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LITERARY BY-PATHS IN 
OLD ENGLAND 




Selborne from the Hanger. — Fronti.ij>!cce 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

IN 

OLD ENGLAND 

BY 

HENRY C. SHELLEY 

'i 

With Illustrations from Photographs by the Author 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1906 



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Copyright, 1906, 
Bv Liitle, Brown, and Company. 



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All rights reserved 



Published October, 1906 



THE EASTERN PRESS, BOSTON, U. S. A. 



TO 

MY WIFE 

K. S. 

CON AMORE 



PREFACE 

Chief among the charms of the English country- 
side is the field footpath. It may not offer the 
most direct route between two given points ; but 
as, avoiding the dusty high road, it leads the 
wanderer over verdant meadows, through fields 
of golden grain, or amid the still recesses of 
sheltering woodlands, he will not grudge the 
lengthening of his journey. Along such path- 
ways, which best afford opportunities for quiet 
meditation, eye and ear are often greeted by 
sights and sounds not seen or heard on the more 
frequented highway. 

Some such function in the world of literature 
it is the object of these pages to fill. They are 
not concerned with criticism, that much-travelled 
and often dust-enveloped thoroughfare ; instead, 
they attempt to seek out the pleasant places in 
the lives of those authors of whom the several 
papers treat. Still, it may be claimed that, not- 
withstanding the avoidance of literary criticism, 
these chapters offer a considerable amount of new 



x PREFACE 

information. In the case of Thomas Carlyle, 
a visit to his native village resulted in the glean- 
ing of some characteristic and unpublished stories 
of the sage and his family ; while the papers on 
John Keats and Thomas Hood are, thanks to the 
kindness of my late friend, Mr. Towneley Green, 
R. I., enriched with much fresh and valuable 
material. Many of the photographs, also, depict 
either places or documents hitherto unidentified 
or unpublished. 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I. In Spenser's Footsteps 1 

II. The Home of Sir Philip Sidney .... 57 

III. Memorials of William Penn 83 

IV. The Birthplace of Gray's Elegy ... 99 
V. Gilbert White's Selborne 125 

VI. Goldsmith's "Deserted Village" . . . 151 

VII. Burns in Ayrshire 173 

VIII. Keats and his Circle 211 

IX. In Carlyle's Country 267 

X. Thomas Hood's Homes and Friends. . . 311 

XI. Royal Winchester 367 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Selborne from the Hanger Frontispiece ' 

IN SPENSER'S FOOTSTEPS page 

Althorpe House 5 

Pembroke College, Cambridge 12 

The Water-gate of Essex House, London 22 

Myrtle Grove, Youghal 29 

Title-page of the First Edition of " The Faerie Queene " ... 35 

Kilcolman Castle 40 

A Grant in Spenser's Handwriting 45 

Sixteenth Century Plan of Westminster, showing King Street, 

where Spenser Died 50 

Spenser's Tomb 52 

Edmund Spenser , 54 



THE HOME OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 

Penshurst Village 61 

Penshurst Place 64 

Penshurst Place : The Ballroom 71 

Penshurst Place : The Picture Gallery 75 

Saccharissa's Sitting-room 79 

Saccharissa's Walk ■ 80 



MEMORIALS OF WILLIAM PENN 

Church of All Hallows Barking, London, where William Penn 

was Baptized 87 

Jordans Meeting-house 89 

Interior of Jordans Meeting-house 91 

Graves of Penn and his Wives at Jordans 95 

xiii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE BIRTHPLACE OF GRAY'S ELEGY 

PAGE 

Stoke Poges Church 103 

Stoke Poges Churchyard 105 

Stoke Court 109 

Gray's Bedroom 110 

Gray's Study 110 

Gray's Summer-house 1 1 1 

" The Yew-tree's Shade " 117 

Gray's Tomb 118 

Gray's Monument 120 

Stoke Poges Manor House 121 

GILBERT WHITE'S SELBORNE 

Cottages in Selborne 129 

The Lythe 131 

The Plestor 133 

Gilbert White's Home 135 

Gilbert White's House from the Rear 137 

Gilbert White's Sun-dial 138 

The Zigzag 140 

Wishing Stone on the Hanger 141 

Well-head 142 

Selborne Parish Register 143 

Selborne Church 145 

In Selborne Church 147 

Knights Templars' Tombs 148 

Gilbert White's Grave 148 



GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE" 

Athlone 156 

The Deserted Village 159 

Glassen Village 163 

Goldsmith House 165 

The " Glassy Brook " 167 

The Busy Mill 168 

The " Decent Church " 169 

The Centre of Ireland 170 

Goldsmith's Grave in the Temple, London 171 

xiv 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

BURNS IN AYRSHIRE page 

Alio way's " Auld Haunted Kirk " 178 

Grave of Burns's Father 180 

The Brig o' Doon 182 

Mount Oliphant 184 

Lochlea Farm 187 

Tarbolton 189 

On the Fail 192 

Masonic Lodge, Tarbolton 193 

Willie's Mill 194 

Mossgiel Farm 197 

The Field of the Daisy 199 

The Cowgate, Mauehline -'01 

Poosie Nansie's, Mauehline 202 

Nanse Tinnock's 203 

Mauehline Castle 205 

Mary Morrison's Home 206 

The Banks of Ayr 208 

KEATS AND HIS CIRCLE 

Facade of Keats 's Schoolhouse 217 

Hay don's Life-mask of Keats 221 

John Hamilton Reynolds -^ 

Mr. Reynolds, Snr 223 

Mrs. Reynolds, Snr 224 

Mrs. Green, n6e Mariane Reynolds 226 

Mrs. John Hamilton Reynolds 231 

Record in the Pupils' Entry Book of Guy's Hospital, London . 246 

Record in the Pupils' Entry Book of Guy's Hospital, London . 247 

Extract from the Register of Apothecaries' Hall, London ... 249 

Keats's Note-book as Medical Student 251 

The Back of Mr. Taylor's Fleet Street House 253 

Keats in his Study at Hampstead 257 

Letter from Keats to Dilke 259 

Great College Street, Westminster 261 

Keats's Copy of Shakespeare 262 

Keats's Last Sonnet 263 

IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY 

Ecclefechan 271 

Arch House, Ecclefechan 274 

xv 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

Room in which Carlyle was Born 275 

Carlyle's First Schoolhouse 281 

The Old Meeting-house, Ecclefechan 283 

Mainhill 287 

Hoddam Hill 291 

Scotsbrig 295 

The " Kind Beech Rows of Ecclefechan " 299 

Carlyle's Grave 305 

Carlyle's London Home 308 



THOMAS HOOD'S HOMES AND FRIENDS 

Elm-tree Avenue, Ham House 314 

Certificate of Birth of Thomas Hood 319 

Robert Street, Adelphi 343 

Sketch by Hood to Celebrate the Marriage of Mariane Reynolds 349 

Rose Cottage, Winchmore Hill 350 

Lake House, Wanstead 351 

Hood's Trees at Wanstead 353 

Mrs. Hood, nee Jane Reynolds 354 

No. 17, Elm-tree Road, St. John's Wood 355 

Thomas Hood 357 

No. 1, Adam Street, Adelphi 362 

Hood's Grave in Kensal Green Cemetery 363 

Medallion on Hood's Monument 366 



ROYAL WINCHESTER 

Wolvesey Castle 371 

Hyde Abbey 373 

Supposed Grave of Alfred the Great 377 

Izaak Walton's Grave 380 

House in which Jane Austen Died 383 

Jane Austen's Grave 384 

Winchester Deanery 386 

The Entrance to St. Cross 388 

The Dole at St. Cross 391 

In the Cloisters of St. Cross 393 

Pope's Schoolhouse at Twyford 395 

Twyford House 397 



1 

IN SPENSER'S FOOTSTEPS 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 
IN OLD ENGLAND 

I 

IN SPENSER'S FOOTSTEPS 

But Spenser I could hare read for ever. Too young to trouble 
myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and ladies 
and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and God 
only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society. 

Sir Walter Scott. 

Edmund Spenser's footprints are hidden under 
the detritus of three hundred years. It was an 
age of national cataclysm in which the bright 
lamp of his spirit was untimely extinguished ; 
England still felt the after-glow of the Armada, 
and the pride of conquest infused the country 
with a strength for which it had no conscious 
outlet. The life of the nation ran high. " Eng- 
lish adventurers were exploring untravelled lands 
and distant oceans ; English citizens were grow- 
ing in wealth and importance ; the farmers made 
the soil give up twice its former yield ; the 
nobility, however fierce their private feuds and 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

rivalries might be, gathered around the Queen 
as their centre." In this new haste of life there 
was no time to carve deeper the footprints of a 
poet who had been an exile so many years ; the 
men who could have done it if they would, joined 
their friend in the silent land with that labour 
left undone. And the life of the nation rushed 
ever on and on. Years after, when patient eyes 
sought those footprints, and tried to map out 
again the earthly pilgrimage of that rare spirit, 
little was left to aid their pious quest. 

Less is known of the parents of Spenser than 
of those of almost any other great poet of the 
modern world. Two facts practically exhaust 
our certain knowledge. His father was related 
to that family of Spensers from which the vic- 
tor of Blenheim sprung. " The nobility of the 
Spensers," wrote Gibbon, "has been illustrated 
and enriched by the trophies of Marlborough ; 
but I exhort them to consider the ' Faerie 
Queene ' as the most precious jewel of their cor- 
onet." What exactly the relationship was it is 
impossible to say ; that there was such a connec- 
tion between the poet and the ancestors of the 
Spencer-Churchill family has never been ques- 
tioned. The poet himself claimed such a rela- 
tionship, and had his claim allowed. To three of 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the daughters of Sir John Spencer — the head 
of the family in his time — Spenser dedicated 
poems, and in those dedications, and elsewhere 
in his verse, he asserts his kinship with those 
ladies and their house. To the Lady Strange he 
speaks of " some private bands of affinitie, which 







-* - fr^ imk .1 


1 * • 


ii; 





Althorpe House 
The Seat of Earl Spencer 



it hath pleased your Ladiship to acknowledge ; " 
to the Lady Carey of " name or kindred's sake 
by you vouchsafed ; " and in that poem which is 
the most autobiographic document he has left 
us — " Colin Clouts Come Home Againe " — he 
sums the trio together as, 

5 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" The sisters three, 
The honor of the noble familie 
Of which I meanest boast my selfe to be, 
And most that unto them I am so nie." 

In one of his sonnets, Spenser gives us an- 
other group of three ladies who entered largely 
into his life, comprising his mother, his Queen, 
and his wife. The link which bound them to- 
gether was that of a common name : 

" Ye three Elizabeths ! for ever live, 
That three such graces did unto me give." 

This meagre fact, then, that her name was Eliz- 
abeth, is all that Spenser has recorded of his 
mother. But of both father and mother some 
little additional information has been offered in 
recent years. While investigating the manu- 
scripts of an old Lancashire family, Mr. R. B. 
Knowles happened upon documents which led 
him to conclude that the poet's parents, by the 
time their son entered Cambridge, were living at 
Burnley in Lancashire. If this theory should 
ever be removed into the category of fact it 
would clear up much of the mystery which 
enshrouds that period of Spenser's life between 
his farewell to Cambridge and his appearance in 
London. It is indisputable that he spent much 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of that interval in the north of England, but 
where and with whom he lived are not known. 

East Smithfield is pointed out as the locality 
of Spenser's birth; the year 1552 as the date. 
Few districts in London have altered so utterly 
out of recognition as the reputed scene of the 
poet's birth. Its vicinity to Tower Hill, then a 
focus of Court life, is suggestive enough of its im- 
portance as a residential district in Elizabethan 
times. Although careful search has been made 
among the registers of all the churches in the 
neighbourhood, no entry of Spenser's birth or 
baptism has been discovered ; for the place and 
for the date tradition is our only authority. It 
is true that one of Spenser's sonnets is cited as 
evidence that he was born in 1552, but in offering 
such a witness two facts have to be taken for 
granted, namely, that the sonnet was written in 
1593, and that its " fourty " years were forty 
years, rather than a lesser or greater period ex- 
pressed in even numbers for poetic purposes. 

Prior to the discovery by Mr. Knowles, re- 
ferred to above, all biographers of Spenser were 
forced to pass at once from his birth to his stu- 
dent days at Cambridge, but now it is possible 
to fill in the blank with some interesting facts as 
to the poet's school-days. One writer minimised 
7 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

that blank by dismissing the question of his 
school-days as of no moment ; but that, surely, is 
a new theory of biography. Among the manu- 
scripts unearthed by Mr. Knowles was one which 
gave a detailed account of the spending of the 
bequests of a London citizen named Robert 
Nowell, and from this it was learned that Spen- 
ser was a pupil of the Merchant Taylors' School. 
Such a discovery directs the enquirer at once to 
the archives of the school itself; and happily 
these are of such a nature as to throw a flood 
of light on the early educational environment of 
the poet. 

It was in 1561 that the Merchant Taylors 
bethought themselves of founding a school, in- 
tended principally for the children of the citizens 
of London, and the estate purchased for the 
purpose included several buildings and a chapel. 
The statutes framed for the administration of the 
school are suggestive of its character. Children 
were not to be admitted unless they could read 
and write and say the catechism in English or 
Latin ; the school hours, both summer and win- 
ter, were from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., with an interval 
between 11 and 1 o'clock; three times each day 
the pupils, " kneeling on their knees," were to say 
the prayers appointed " with due tract and paus- 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

ing." Nor are these particulars the only facts 
from which the imagination can weave its picture 
of the boy Spenser in school. The head-master 
in Spenser's time, and for many years after, was 
Dr. Richard Mulcaster, of whom Andrew Fuller 
has drawn this picture : " In a morning he would 
exactly and plainly construe and parse the lesson 
to his scholars ; which done, he slept his hour 
(custom made him critical to proportion it) in his 
desk in the school, but woe be to the scholar 
that slept the while. Awaking, he heard them 
accurately ; and Atropos might be persuaded to 
pity as soon as he to pardon, where he found just 
fault. The prayers of cockering mothers pre- 
vailed with him as much as the requests of indul- 
gent fathers, rather increasing than mitigating 
his severity on their offending children ; but 
his sharpness was the better endured because 
impartial ; and many excellent scholars were bred 
under him." In that last remark, Fuller wrote 
wiser than he knew. How it would have 
rounded his sentence had his knowledge enabled 
him to write the name of Spenser among those 
scholars ! For Spenser was a deeply learned 
poet, and it is not idle to suppose that his passion 
for knowledge owed much to this severe mentor 
of his youthful days. 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

How came Spenser to be sent to Cambridge ? 
Some light is thrown upon this question by a fur- 
ther consideration of the history of the Merchant 
Taylors' School. A few years after that school 
was established, the Lord Mayor and alder- 
men of London suggested to the Merchant 
Taylors the advisability of founding a scholar- 
ship at one of the universities. The company 
replied that as they had been to so much expense 
in establishing the school they could not burden 
their funds with that further charge, but they 
were willing to suggest that such scholarships 
might be founded at the cost of any individual 
member who might feel so disposed. Until that 
was done, however, the school did not lack for 
friends willing to carry out the Lord Mayor's 
suggestion. The yearly examination of the 
school took place in that chapel referred to 
above, and among the scholarly men present at 
the first examination was Archdeacon Watts, 
who had already founded scholarships at Pem- 
broke Hall, Cambridge, "with a general prefer- 
ence for youths educated at schools in the 
metropolis." It is explicitly stated that several 
of his first scholars were such as had attracted 
his notice during the annual examination, and 
that fact, taken in conjunction with another, 
10 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

makes it practically certain that Spenser was one 
of those early participants of his bounty. The 
other fact which supports this theory is that 
Dean Alexander Nowell frequently attended the 
yearly examination of the Merchant Taylors' 
School ; and that Spenser was one of the scholars 
who profited from the estate of his brother 
Robert Nowell points surely to a friendly talk 
on the poet's behalf between Dean Nowell and 
Archdeacon Watts. 

Robert Nowell died early in the year 1569, 
and in the accounts for his funeral there is a 
list giving the names of six boys of the Mer- 
chant Taylors' School to whom two yards of 
cloth were given to make their gowns. The 
name of Edmund Spenser stands first on that 
list. Two months later his name appears again 
in the accounts of Robert Nowell, the entry, 
under date April 28, reading : " to Edmond 
Spensore, scholler of the m'chante tayler scholl, 
at his gowinge to penbrocke hall in chambridge, 
xs." On the 20th of the following month, that 
is, May, 1569, Spenser entered Pembroke Hall 
(now Pembroke College) as a sizar, and during 
his student days there he was several times 
indebted to the Nowell funds for small gifts of 
money. He probably needed them all. Pov- 
11 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

erty and ill health marked his university career. 
The college records prove the latter ; his position 
as sizar, independent of his description as a "poure 
scholler " in the Nowell accounts, the former. 




Pembroke College, Cambridge 

Of Spenser as a Cambridge student we have 
but a shadowy picture. He took his B.A. in 
1573, his M.A. in 1576 ; he made two friends 
in the persons of Gabriel Harvey and Edward 
Kirke ; he planted, if tradition speaks truly, the 
mulberry tree which still survives in the garden 
of his college. Some biographers would have us 
believe that his undergraduate days were em- 

12 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

bittered by conflicts with the authorities, but 
we have no reliable data for such an opinion. 
John Aubrey, in a statement which must be ex- 
amined later, asserted that the poet " missed the 
fellowship there which Bishop Andrews got," 
but throws no further light on the subject. Per- 
haps the theory that Spenser was unhappy in his 
student life receives slight support from the fact 
that although he refers with affection to his uni- 
versity he makes no mention of his college. The 
reference to Cambridge is in the fourth book 
(Canto XI) of the "Faerie Queene," where the 
poet describes the rivers which he summons 
to grace the wedding of the Thames and the 
Medway. 

" Next these the plenteous Ouse came far from land, 
By many a city and by many a towne 
And many rivers taking under-hand 
Into his waters as he passeth downe, 
The Cle, the Were, the Grant, the Sture, the Rowne. 
Thence doth by Huntingdon and Cambridge flit, 
My mother Cambridge, whom as with a Crowne 
He doth adorne, and is adorn'd of it 
With many a gentle Muse and many a learned wit." 

It is known that Spenser left Cambridge in 
1576 on taking his M.A. degree, and it is also 
established that he was in London by October, 
1579. Where did he spend the interval ? If 

13 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Mr. Knowles is correct in thinking the poet's 
parents were now living at Burnley, it is natural 
to suppose that a part of the time at least was 
passed in their company. All authorities are 
agreed, and on good evidence, that Spenser 
went into the north of England on leaving 
Cambridge, but it seems impossible to locate 
his exact whereabouts. Just here, however, it 
is right that the statement of John Aubrey, the 
antiquarian, should be considered. Aubrey, who 
was born some twenty-seven years after Spen- 
ser's death, had an intimate acquaintance with 
many famous English writers, and it is to him 
we are indebted for many vivid facts about 
Bacon, Milton, Raleigh, and others. He is, in 
short, a credible witness, whose testimony carries 
great weight even in the face of improbability. 
In one of his manuscripts, then, he sets down 
these particulars of our poet : " Mr. Edmond 
Spenser was of Pembroke- hall, in Cambridge. 
He missed the fellowship there which Bishop 
Andrews got. He was an acquaintance of Sir 
Erasmus Dryden ; his mistress Rosalinde was a 
kinswoman of Sir Erasmus's lady. The cham- 
ber there at Sir Erasmus's is still called ' Spenser's 
chamber.' Lately in the college, taking down 
the wainscot of his chamber, they found abun- 

14 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

dance of cards, with stanzas of the Faery Queen 
written on them. From John Dryden, poet 
laureat, Mr. Beeston says, he was a little man, 
wore short hair, and little band, and little 
cuffes." Such is Aubrey's interesting state- 
ment ; but there are two considerations which 
make the critic hesitate to accept it in an 
unqualified manner. These are, first, that Sir 
Erasmus Dryden was, in 1576, of too tender an 
age to have entered upon the responsibility of 
matrimony ; and, second, that his seat at Canons 
Ash by in Northamptonshire would hardly har- 
monise with the theory which locates Spenser in 
the north of England. Perhaps neither objec- 
tion is very serious. Sir Erasmus may have 
wedded at a precocious age, and Spenser may 
have sojourned in the north of England and 
still had time to spare for Canons Ashby. 

Amid so much that is nebulous in the history 
of Spenser, it would be a relief to think that the 
mask has been removed from the fair face of 
his Rosalind. Of course there have not been 
lacking theories of her identification ; and they 
have, in the main, been as childish if not as nu- 
merous as those which cluster around the person 
of Dante's Beatrice. No one, however, has yet 
arisen to dissolve Rosalind away as a myth ; she 

15 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

was so real to the poet that her personality 
refuses to be translated into a philosophical 
abstraction. How real she was, and what a sad 
time Spenser had with her ! Meeting her fresh 
from college and while full of high hopes as he 
stood on the threshold of life, her image domi- 
nated his life to within a few years of its close. 
In that autobiographic poem already quoted, 
which was penned on the eve of his marriage 
with another woman, he rebukes his fellow shep- 
herds for complaining that Rosalind had repaid 
his love " with scorne and foule despite." 

" For she is not like as the other crew 
Of shepheards' daughters that amongst you bee, 
But of divine regard and heavenly hew, 
Excelling all that ever ye did see. 
Not then to her that scorned thing so base, 
But to my selfe the blame that lookt so hie." 

Perhaps that last phrase lends support to Au- 
brey's assertion that Rosalind was kinswoman to 
Sir Erasmus Dryden's lady. Also, it is to be 
remembered that E. K.'s "glosse" to the April 
poem of the "Shepheards Calender" points in 
the same direction. Rosalind, says this witness, 
who was "privie" to the poet's counsel, was a 
" Gentlewoman of no meane house, nor endewed 
with anye vulgare and common gifts, both of 

nature and manners." 

16 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Although Spenser loved in vain for himself he 
did not love in vain for his art. No poet ever 
does. From the travail of his unrequited pas- 
sion there were born children of fancy who long 
ago joined the dwellers of that dream-world 
which is peopled with the creations of poets. In 
the words of Dean Church, " Rosalind had given 
an impulse to the young poet's powers, and a 
colour to his thoughts, and had enrolled Spenser 
in that band and order of poets — with one ex- 
ception, not the greatest order— -to whom the 
wonderful passion of love, in its heights and its 
depths, is the element on which their imagina- 
tion works, and out of which it moulds its most 
beautiful and characteristic creations." 

It is certain that Spenser returned to London 
by October, 1579, and it seems probable that an 
earlier date may be accepted. One authority de- 
clares the poet to have become a member of the 
household of Leicester House not later than 1578. 
In the June afglogue of the kk Shepheards Calender," 
Hobbinol (who is Gabriel Harvey in rustic guise) 
advises his friend Colin Clout (Spenser's poetic 
name for himself) to " forsake the soyle that so 
doth thee bewitch " and hie him to the dales, 

" Where shepheards riteh, 

And fruictful flocks, bene every where to see." 
2 17 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

This advice, avers E. K., "is no Poetical fic- 
tion, but unfeynedly spoken of the Poete self'e, 
who for speciall occasion of private affayres, (as 
I have bene partly of himselfe informed), and 
for his more preferment, removing out of the 
Northparts, came into the South, as Hobbinol 
indeede advised him privately.'' In fine, Gabriel 
Harvey roundly told his friend that life was too 
serious a thing to be spent in vain regrets for 
Rosalind ; he had better be off to London and 
try his fortune there. And Gabriel Harvey gave 
more than advice ; he, it seems, was the means 
of introducing Spenser to Sir Philip Sidney, 
and thus opening to him the avenue along which 
such preferment as was to be his lot eventually 
came. 

So persistent and probable is the tradition 
which makes Spenser the companion of Sidney 
at Penshurst that one inclines hopefully to the 
theory which dates the return of the poet some 
months at least prior to October, 1579. Than 
Penshurst for a home and Sidney for a compan- 
ion there could have been no fitter education 
for the poet who was to sing the swan-song of 
English chivalry. Time has dealt tenderly with 
the grey walls of the fair Kentish home of Sid- 
ney ; they stand to-day little changed by the 

18 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

summers and winters of more than three cen- 
turies. Here, indeed, are environments amid 
which it is easy to frame a picture of the poet 
and his courtly friend ; it would strike no discord 
to meet them in earnest talk in this old-world 
baronial hall, or wandering arm in arm amid 
the glades of this ancestral park. " The gen- 
erall end of all the booke," wrote Spenser of the 
" Faerie Queene," " is to fashion a gentleman or 
noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." 
And who but Sidney was his model ? He " im- 
pressed his own noble and beautiful character 
deeply on Spenser's mind. Spenser saw and 
learned in him what was then the highest type 
of the finished gentleman." 

But the poet had other occupation at Pens- 
hurst than that of studying the character of 
his host. While it is probable that the " Shep- 
heards Calender" was begun in the north, in- 
ternal evidence points clearly to its completion 
amid the southern dales which surround Sid- 
ney's home. Wherever begun and ended, the 
poem was out of Spenser's hands ere the year 
closed, for on Dec. 5th, 1579, this entry was 
made on behalf of one " Hughe Singelton " in 
the register of Stationers' Hall : " Lyccnced 
unto him the Shepperdes Calender conteyrdnge 
1.9 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

ocij ecloges proportionable to the ocij montkes." 
Although there are reasons for believing that 
the " Shepheards Calender " was by no means 
the first fruits of Spenser's muse, that volume 
was his first serious bid for the suffrages of 
Elizabethan England as its chief poet. But the 
bid was made in a very modest manner. The 
volume appeared anonymously, under the shel- 
tering wing of a dedication to Sidney, and with 
a commendatory epistle from the pen of E. K., 
the initials, as we know, of the poet's Cambridge 
friend. True, the epistle was bold enough ; 
E. K. had no doubts about the quality of the 
poet for whom he stood sponsor. Unknown, 
unkissed, he might be at that moment, " but I 
doubt not , so soon as his name shall come into 
the knowledge of men, and his worthiness be 
sounded in the trump of fame, but that he shall 
be not only kissed, but also beloved of all, 
embraced of the most, and wondered at of the 
best." 

Edward Kirke had not long to wait for the 
fulfilment of his prophecy. Spenser's success 
appears to have been instantaneous. England 
was waiting for a new poet, and had grace 
given to recognise him when he appeared. 
" But now yet at the last," wrote one critic 

20 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

while his mind was filled with thoughts of Vir- 
gil, "hath England hatched one poet of this 
sort, in my conscience comparable with the best 
in any respect: even master Sp., author of the 
« Shepherd's Calender,' whose travail in that 
piece of English poetry 1 think verily is so com- 
mendable, as none of equal judgment can yield 
him less praise for his excellent skill and skil- 
ful excellency showed forth in the same than 
they would to either Theocritus or Virgil." 

Very soothing, no doubt, all this must have 
been to the " New Poet," as Spencer was called, 
but also not very satisfying. These fine words 
did not butter his parsnips. The days were not 
yet when laudatory reviews and a consensus of 
favourable opinion had their immediate result in 
substantial cheques from the publisher. Spenser 
had come to London " for his more prefer- 
ment," and praise for his poetry, however com- 
forting, was but a poor stone instead of bread. 
And yet his success as a singer may have been 
responsible for such advancement in life as was 
to be his share. Sidney was the relative of 
many influential men in those days, and the 
friend of many more, and he it was, we may be 
sure, who secured the poet a place in the house- 
hold of Leicester House. That was a notable 

21 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

river-side mansion in Spenser's time. Once the 
house of Lord Paget, it was now the abode of 




The Watek-gate of Essex House, London 

the Earl of Leicester, and known by his name. 
Years after it was by him bequeathed to his 
son-in-law, the Earl of Essex, and as Essex 

22 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

House it sheltered Spenser when in London, six- 
teen years later, on the last quest for "more pre- 
ferment." It has all vanished now, save the 
arch and steps at the bottom of Essex Street 
which once served as the water-gate of the 
mansion and saw the "two gentle knights" of 
the " Prothalamion " receive those " two faire 
Brides, their Loves delight." There are prob- 
ably no other stones standing in all London 
which can claim to have figured as these arch- 
way pillars did in the life of Spenser. 

Perhaps those were not happy days he spent 
in Leicester House ; instinctively they recall the 
sorrows of the solitary Florentine and his 

" Thou shalt have proof how savoureth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going down and up another's stairs." 

It may have been otherwise ; we cannot tell ; 
but to the high-spirited man there are few trials 
so galling as waiting for the oportunity to put 
out to usury the talents of which he is conscious. 
Spenser, twenty-eight years old, acknowledged 
the chief poet of his country since Chaucer, 
well-equipped for serving the State in high 
capacity, was waiting, wearily waiting, for some- 
thing to do. It was his mischance that that age 
bred a plethora of able men. 

23 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

At last his opportunity came, but in a form he 
probably little expected. It seems clear that his 
heart was set on some state service which would 
give him space to approve the reputation he had 
won ; his letters to his friend Harvey bristle with 
poetic projects and schemes for high achieve- 
ment in the realm of letters. That he fulfilled 
his mission, but independent of the aid he had 
anticipated, is not the least jewel in his crown. 

While Spenser was still waiting, the ministers 
of Elizabeth were struggling with that problem 
which has been the nightmare of English states- 
men for countless generations, — the problem of 
what to do with Ireland. Deputy after deputy, 
many of them men of clear vision and high pur- 
pose, had returned home foiled in the task of 
giving that country a stable government. Sid- 
ney's father, Sir Henry Sidney, had been the 
last to resign the hopeless labour, and for two 
years the Queen had no personal representative 
among her Irish subjects. But circumstances 
had arisen which made the appointment of a new 
deputy an urgent necessity, and in the summer 
of 1580 Lord Grey of Wilton was appointed 
to fill that "great place which had wrecked the 
reputation and broken the hearts of a succes- 
sion of able and high-spirited servants of the 

24 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

English Crown." This appointment was of 
great moment to Spenser, for, probably at the 
advice of Philip Sidney, Lord Grey made choice 
of the " New Poet " as his secretary. 

For the remainder of Spenser's life we have to 
think of him as an exile. There were, it is true, 
as will be seen, several visits home, each under- 
taken apparently in the hope of "more prefer- 
ment " on English soil, but those visits are the 
only relief in the picture. Probably it is quite 
reasonable to suppose that the poet distilled 
some enjoyment out of his life in Ireland, but it 
is impossible to ignore the fact that his absence 
from London in those days of intense life in lit- 
erature and politics robbed him of much keen 
pleasure. He was in the golden era of English 
letters and yet not of it ; it was his fate to " live 
in the Elizabethan age, and to be severed from 
those brilliant spirits to which the fame of that 
age is due." 

Socially, too, his new life presented a sad 
contrast to the environment he had left behind : 
instead of the settled comfort of Elizabethan 
England, the perturbed life of rebellious Ireland. 
His verse reflects the change in many passages, 
some of which are charged with that pensive 
feeling which even to-day besets the traveller 

25 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

in some parts of Ireland. Once, while freshly 
remembering the sights and sounds which had 
greeted him on a brief visit to his native land, 
and contrasting them with the common events 
of daily life in the land of his exile, he poured 
out his spirit in these plaintive lines : 

" For there all happie peace and plenteous store 
Conspire in one to make contented blisse. 
No wayling there nor wretchedness is heard, 
No bloodie issues nor no leprosies. 
No griesly famine, nor no raging sweard. 
No nightly bordrags, nor no hue and cries ; 
The shepheards there abroad may safely lie, 
On hills and downes, withouten dread or daunger." 

Our conception of what exactly were Spen- 
ser's official occupations in Ireland is by no 
means so clear as might be wished. He went 
thither as the new deputy's secretary, and when 
that office took end he seems to have passed 
from one clerkship to another until his days 
were numbered. Various grants were made to 
him from time to time. Now he receives a lease 
of the Abbey of Enniscorthy, and a year later 
a six years' lease of a house in Dublin. When 
Munster was settled, he shared with many 
others in the grants of land then made, his por- 
tion being the Castle of Kilcolman and an estate 
of three thousand acres. This was the most 

26 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

considerable prize that ever fell to his lot, and 
Kilcolman, as it became his home, is the one 
definite mark on the map of Ireland which Spen- 
ser's name suggests. But none of these grants 
made him a wealthy man. So far as worldly 
goods go, the line of Giles Fletcher sums up his 
case : 

" Poorly, poor man, he lived ; poorly, poor man, he died." 

When Spenser went to Ireland he carried the 
scheme of the " Faerie Queene " with him. He 
may have shaped it into some form during his 
college or north of England days ; there can be 
little doubt that he talked it over with Sidney at 
Penshurst. But, admitting that the idea of the 
poem took early root in his mind, the fashioning 
of it into its final form was accomplished almost 
wholly on Irish soil. In a curious and very 
scarce pamphlet, bearing the title of " A Dis- 
course of Civil Life," there is given a description 
of a meeting of literary men, which took place 
in a cottage near Dublin somewhere between the 
years 1584- and 1588. The author, Ludowick 
Bryskett, explains that a debate took place at 
that meeting on ethics, and he describes himself 
as asking one member of the company, " very 
well read in Philosophy, both moral and natural," 

27 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

to favour the rest with his conclusions on the 
matter. The one so appealed to was Edmund 
Spenser. His answer, as reported by Bryskett, 
inasmuch as it is practically our only Boswellian 
glimpse of the poet, is worth transcribing : 
" Though it may seem hard for me, to refuse the 
request made by you all, whom every one alone, 
I should for many respects be willing to gratify ; 
yet as the case standeth, I doubt not but with 
the consent of the most part of you, 1 shall be ex- 
cused at this time of this task which would be laid 
upon me ; for sure I am, that it is not unknown 
unto you, that I have already undertaken a work 
tending to the same effect, which is in heroical 
verse under the title of a ' Faery Queen ' to 
represent all the moral virtues, assigning to every 
virtue a Knight to be the patron and defender of 
the same, in whose actions and feats of arms and 
chivalry the operations of that virtue, whereof 
he is the protector, are to be expressed, and the 
vices and unruly appetites that oppose themselves 
against the same, to be beaten down and over- 
come. Which work, as I have already well 
entered into, if God shall please to spare me life 
that I may finish it according to my mind, your 
wish will be in some sort accomplished, though 
perhaps not so effectually as you could desire." 

28 




&MMPS 



Mvrtle Grove, Y 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Nor is this the only testimony which goes to 
prove that the " Faerie Queene " was largely 
written in Ireland. In the sonnets to various 
noble persons which Spenser published with 
the poem, he avers more than once that it was 
produced on " savadge soyle, far from Pamasso 
Mount." Tradition, then, has everything to sup- 
port it when it associates the solitary ruins of Kil- 
colman Castle with the creation of the " Faerie 
Queene." And there is another tradition which 
has something in its favour. One of the princi- 
pal sharers in the planting of Munster was Sir 
Walter Raleigh, and a large bay window in his 
house at Youghai is still pointed out as the spot 
where Spenser wrote many stanzas of his great 
poem. Certainly Raleigh and Spenser renewed 
their friendship in Ireland, and there is nothing 
improbable in the legend which makes the poet a 
guest at Youghai. This theory makes it plausi- 
ble to regard Raleigh's presence at Kilcolman in 
the nature of a return visit, and if he heard noth- 
ing of the " Faerie Queene " in his own home it is 
clear that the omission was rectified in the poet's. 
Colin Clout puts this beyond a doubt. Sought 
out in his exile by the " Shepheard of the Ocean," 
as Raleigh called himself, Spenser was not loth 
to play his visitor a " pleasant fit " on his pipes, 

31 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

in other words, to read him his " heroical verse." 
Raleigh was quick to measure the value of the 
work Spenser had done, and forthwith urged him 
to return to London with him and give it to the 
world. It is impossible to resist a suspicion that 
Raleigh was thinking of his own advantage as 
well as Spenser's. He had left England under 
the frown of Elizabeth ; to return as sponsor to a 
poet who would reflect lustre on her person and 
her reign might be a cheap method of chang- 
ing the frown to a smile. In any case, Spenser 
can hardly have wanted much persuasion. He 
had tasted exile for ten years ; he had finished 
enough of his great task to make a considerable 
volume ; it might be that as the " Shepheards 
Calender " started the sequence of events which 
took him across the Irish Channel, the " Faerie 
Queene " would be the means of ending his 
banishment. Raleigh's plan was approved, and 
Spenser returned to London in his company, 
bearing with him the first three books of the 
" Faerie Queene." 

Much had happened of consequence to Spenser 
during the ten years of his absence. Sidney died 
in 1586, and Leicester had followed two years 
later. These two had befriended the poet with 
their powerful influence, and now he could reckon 

32 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

on their aid no longer. True, he had strengthened 
the bonds of friendship with Raleigh, but that 
might avail him little if Elizabeth remained 
unkind. It is clear, then, that Spenser must have 
realised how much depended on the poetic work 
he brought with him ; if that should win the 
favour of the Queen all might be well, and his 
life-long search for " more preferment " be suc- 
cessful at last. 

Arriving in England probably some time in 
November, 1589, Spenser lost no time in arrang- 
ing for the publication of his first instalment of 
the " Faerie Queene." The " Shepheards Calen- 
der " had been published by one Hugh Singleton, 
of Creed Lane, " at the signe of the Gylden 
Tunne " ; the " Faerie Queene " was entrusted to 
the hands of William Ponsonby, who did business 
at the sign of the Bishop's Head in St. Paul's 
Churchyard. There is no known reason why 
Spenser changed his publisher, but probably 
Ponsonby had attracted his attention by the fact 
that he had secured permission to print Sidney's 
" Arcadia," and had already obtained the neces- 
sary license for its publication. Spenser did not 
change his publisher again, for although his 
" View of the Present State of Ireland " was pro- 
visionally licensed in 1598, by Mathew Lownes, 

3 33 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

it was not printed until 1633, thirty-four years 
after the writer's death. To Ponsonby, then, 
belonged the honour of issuing the bulk of Spen- 
ser's work to the world, and he appears to have 
availed himself of his privilege with true publisher 
instinct. For when the " Faerie Queene " proved 
to be such a success, and had set the tongues of 
men wagging with Spenser's praise, Ponsonby, 
on his own initiative, raked together such of the 
poet's minor verses as were circulating in manu- 
script and published them in a small volume, 
protesting to the " gentle reader " that his ob- 
ject in so doing was " the better increase and 
accomplishment of your delights." There are no 
records of financial transactions between Spenser 
and his publisher. Perhaps it is as well there 
are not ; there has been weeping enough over 
the disproportion between the fame of " Para- 
dise Lost " and the monetary recompense of its 
author. 

When gazing upon the entries of Spenser's 
various works in the old registers of Stationers' 
Hall, the centuries that lie between the Ed- 
wardian and Elizabethan eras seem to vanish. 
Here, still vividly legible, is the handwriting of 
men who knew Ponsonby and possibly the poet 
by sight, who were witnesses of the birth of books 

34 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

which have become some of the glories of English 
literature. It was on the 1st of December, 1589, 
that, against the name of " Master Ponsonbye," 

THE FAERIE 

QVEENE. 

I iofed in co cwcluc books, 

XII. Moral I vcrtucs. 




L O N 

for William PorJbnbic. 
" 5 9 °- 

Title-page of the First Edition of "The Faerie Queene" 

this record was made in one of those ancient 
registers : " Entered for his Copyc, a booke 
intytuled tJic fayrye Queene dysposed into odj 
bookes, etc. Aucthorysed under the handes of 
the Archbishoj) of Canterbury and bathe the 

35 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

wardens.'" It will be seen that the entry makes 
no reference to the fact that only three of the 
twelve books were to be published on this occa- 
sion. Xor is there any mention of the poet's 
name ; only once, in connection with the " Amo- 
retti" volume of 1594, was his name associated 
with his work in the Stationers' registers. 

Spenser sent his " Shepheards Calender " into 
the world anonymously, but he claimed the par- 
entage of the " Faerie Queene " from the day of 
publication. His earlier work had been attrib- 
uted to various writers ; there should be no mys- 
tery about this child of his fancy. Not only 
does he avow his ownership of the poem in his 
famous explanatory letter to Raleigh, but he sets 
his name boldly to the dedication addressed to 
the Queen. That dedication was amplified in a 
later edition, its original reading being : " To the 
most mightie and Magnificent Empresse Eliza- 
beth, by the grace of God Queene of England, 
France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc. 
Her most humble servant : Ed. Spenser." It 
would be unjust to attribute this dedication, and 
the laudation of Elizabeth in the poem itself, to 
base motives ; Spenser was but writing in har- 
mony with the manner of his day. It is true, as 
Dean Church remarked, that there is nothing in 
36' 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

history which can be compared to the "gross, 
shameless, lying flattery paid to the Queen," but 
the poet did not set that fashion ; his only is the 
negative blame of not rising above it. Of course 
he wished to reap what he could from the har- 
vest he had sown, and Raleigh no doubt urged 
that the " Faerie Queene " should be published 
as completely as possible under the patronage of 
Elizabeth. 

There was no hesitation or diffidence about 
the welcome given to Spenser's new work. His 
friend, Gabriel Harvey, who had been lukewarm 
to the idea of the poem when it was first put 
before him, was won over completely : 

" Collvn, I see, by thy new taken taske, 
Some sacred fury hath enricht thy braynes." 

Raleigh, as might have been expected, poured 
forth praise with liberal pen, and imagined 
Petrarch weeping and Homer trembling at the 
advent of this rival ; even Nash, who laid about 
him usually with a whip of scorpions, paused to 
extol the " stately tuned verse " of the " Faerie 
Queene." In short, Spenser's cup was once more 
overflowing with praise, as it had done ten years 
before when he had approved himself England's 
new poet. But was praise to be all ? Not quite. 
Elizabeth, close-fisted as she was, evidently 
37 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

thought she must do something for the poet who 
had done so much for her, and it was like Spen- 
ser's luck that his Queen was persuaded to make 
her bounty less than she had intended. Tradi- 
tion affirms that Elizabeth ordered a goodly sum 
to be given the poet, but that on Lord Burghley 
murmuring " What ! all this for a song ? " the 
order was changed into " Well, let him have 
what is reason." In the end Spenser was awarded 
a pension of £50 a year, which he began to enjoy 
in February, 1591. 

A pension of £50 a year was better than noth- 
ing, but that Spenser was bitterly disappointed 
in not being offered some State employment in 
his native England is beyond doubt. Raleigh's 
friendship had not been such a great gain to him 
after all, or, perhaps, it would be kinder to say 
that any effort Raleigh made was thwarted by 
Burghley. Many reasons have been offered for 
Burghley's dislike of Spenser, but none of those 
reasons are so material as the fact that that dis- 
like existed in a pronounced form. Spenser was 
well aware of the fact ; he hints the sad case of 
the man who has his Prince's grace but wants his 
Peers'; and he hides up in his lines now and then 
a sly bit of sweet revenge against Elizabeth's chief 
minister. But there was to be no success for 

38 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

him at Court ; and when he reached his lonely- 
home in Ireland again, and had time to think 
calmly over the experiences through which he 
had passed, he was enabled to reach the sane 
conclusion that things were best as they were. 

" For, sooth to say, it is no sort of life, 
For shepheard fit to lead in that same place, 
Where each one seeks with malice, and with strife, 
To thrust downe other into foule disgrace, 
Himselfe to raise." 

Early in the year 1591 Spenser returned to his 
Irish home at Kilcolman, and before the year 
was out he had, in " Colin Clouts Come Home 
Againe," found sufficient reasons for thinking that 
he ought to be at least moderately contented 
with his lot. It is pleasant to suppose that he 
was not altogether lonely in his exile. There 
are reasons for believing that a sister kept house 
for him, and probably congenial friends, such as 
Gabriel Harvey and Ludowick Bryskett, visited 
him now and then. But for such ameliorations 
as these, and his delight in verse, his lot would 
have been almost unendurable. The fact that he 
was an Englishman would be sufficient to em- 
bitter the natives of the district against him, and 
that feeling must have been intensified a thou- 
sandfold by his occupancy of Kilcolman, a castle 
39 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

which had once belonged to the Earls of Des- 
mond. The poet's name, like that of Cromwell, 
is still a word of scorn in Ireland, and such living 
records as we have of his Kilcolman days are 
tinged with hatred. One inveterate enemy he 
had in the person of Lord Roche, 

who forbad his peo- pie to 

have any trade or 
.conference with 




Kilcolman Castle 

Spenser or his tenants, and, in true Irish fashion, 
killed an animal belonging to a man who had 
dared to give the poet a night's lodging when 
returning from the Limerick sessions. 

Rosalind has been lost sight of during these 
years of exile, but not forgotten by Spenser. 
The closing passages of " Colin Clouts Come 
Home Againe " describe, as has been seen, the 
anger of Colin's fellow shepherds for Rosalind's 

40 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

cruel treatment of their friend, and his defence 
of his mistress. More, in almost his last words 
he bids his comrades 

" Unto the world for ever witness bee 
That hers I die." 

Alas for the inconstancy of man ! Spenser 
was not destined to remain faithful to his ideal. 
Xot long after he wrote those words there crossed 
his path a lady whose name recalled his mother 
and his Queen, an Elizabeth who was to supplant 
Rosalind in his life and verse. There is no record 
of his courtship save that darkly hinted at in his 
sonnets, but that record is sufficient to prove 
that he had no easy conquest. At first he ap- 
pears to have had as little hope of success as with 
Rosalind, and his verse is overclouded with som- 
bre hues of anticipated rejection. Of course he 
pours out all the wealth of his fancy in homage 
to this new-found love. 

" What guyle is this, that those her golden tresses 
She doth attyre under a net of gold ; 
And with sly skill so cunningly them dresses, 
That which is gold, or heare, may scarce be told ? 
Is it that men's frayle eyes, which gaze too bold, 
She may entangle in that golden snare ; 
And, being caught, may craftily enfold 
Theyr weaker harts, which are not wel aware ? 
Take heed, therefore, myne eyes, how ye doe stare 
\\ 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Henceforth too rashly on that guilefull nett, 
In which, if ever ye entrapped are, 
Out of her bands ye by no meanes shall get. 
Fondness it were for any, being free, 
To covet fetters, though they golden bee ! " 

For all that, Spenser did covet them, and in 
June, 1594, he gladly assumed the bonds of wed- 
lock. For wedding present he gave his wife that 
bridal ode, his " Epithalamion," which has no 
rival in any language, to be 

" Unto her a goodly ornament, 
And for short time an endlesse moniment." 

For such a gift surely high-born ladies would 
be content to forego the choicest coronet or the 
costliest crown. Sonnets and ode were sent 
across to Ponsonby the publisher, and Spenser 
had not been a married man six months before 
the rich fruit of his love passion had been gar- 
nered in the store of English literature. 

Almost as soon as the " Amoretti and Epitha- 
lamion " volume had been entered at Stationers' 
Hall, the poet himself was in London again. 
Perhaps the increased responsibilities of wedded 
life made him long once again for " more prefer- 
ment," or perhaps the cause for his visit must be 
sought in the fact that he had finished another 
three books of the " Faerie Queene," and was 

42 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

anxious to see them through the press himself. 
The Stationers' Hull record of this second instal- 
ment of the great poem, again placed to the 
credit of " Master Ponsonby," reads: " 20th die 
Januarii. Entredfor his copie under the handes 
of the Wardens, The second parte of the ffaery 
Queue eonteining the 4> 5, and 6 bookes" This 
was in 1596, and it seems probable that Spenser 
remained in London all through that year and 
into the beginning of the next. The Earl of 
Essex was in favour now, that peer who had 
succeeded to the possession of Leicester House 
and renamed it after himself, and the poet prob- 
ably expected that so powerful a friend would 
pave the way for him to some profitable office 
at home. 

We have only one picture of Spenser during 
this second visit home, and that was drawn by 
himself. Towards the end of 1596 he wrote a 
" Spousal verse " in honour of the marriage, at 
Essex House, of the two daughters of the Earl 
of Worcester, and in that poem he refers to him- 
self as afflicted by 

" Sullein care, 
Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay 
In Prince's Court, and expectation vayne 
Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, 
Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne." 
43 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Although Leicester had not done much for 
him, he generously implies, now he is dead, that 
he had been a helpful friend, and thinks of him 
as one "whose want too well now feeles my 
freendles case." An undercurrent of sadness 
runs through this " spousal verse ; " the poet is 
conscious of the incongruous effect ; he tries to 
subdue the discord with a higher note of mel- 
ody ; but the feeling left when the music ceases 
is more akin to pathos than joy. For this, had 
he known it, was really Spenser's swan-song. 
There was to be no life of leisured ease for him, 
nor any home in his smiling native land. He 
must return to that half-ruined castle on the 
wild plain at the foot of the Galtee hills, must 
face the ill-omened scowls of the aliens again, 
and live on as best he might amid sights and 
sounds of wretchedness made all the more pain- 
ful by the remembered contrasts of his beloved 
England. 

In one matter Spenser may have thought 
himself fortunate. With that ineptitude which 
was ingrained in his character, King James of 
Scotland actually asked that the poet should be 
arrested and punished for the picture he had 
drawn of his mother Mary Queen of Scots, in 
the character of Duessa. The passage which 

44 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

had so moved the Scots King is that in Canto 
IX, Book IV, of the "Faerie Queene;" he 
thought little, apparently, of the earlier sketch 
in the eighth canto of the first book ! Having 
so many friends, and probably some enemies, at 
court, Spenser no doubt heard of his danger, 



-A. £. <j. 





. 


...*» 




. 


__ 



A Grant in Spenser's Handwriting 

and in those uncertain times he must have fully 
appreciated the narrow escape he had had. But 
was not Kilcolman prison enough for such a 
spirit ? 

Back, then, to Ireland, to Kilcolman, again, 
and now for the last time. The date is uncer- 
tain, but it was probably early in 1597. He 
lived quietly through that year, and as the next 

45 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

year was waning to its close there came the 
welcome news that he had been appointed 
Sheriff of the county of Cork. Lord Burghley 
was dead, and now, perchance, he was on the 
highroad to that " more preferment " he had 
sought so long. In this year of new hope he 
had prepared, for the Queen's special guidance, 
a brief paper on the state of Ireland, and its 
proem is the last sigh we catch from his lips : 
"Out of the ashes of desolation and wasteness 
of this your wretched Realm of Ireland, vouch- 
safe, most mighty Empress our dread sovereign, 
to receive the voices of a few most unhappy 
ghosts (of whom is nothing but the ghost now 
left), which lie buried in the bottom of oblivion, 
far from the light of your gracious sunshine." 
That deep-shadowed picture is suddenly illu- 
mined by the promise of brighter days for the 
poet. But it is only such a rift in the clouds 
as heralds the denser darkness before the storm. 
That autumn of 1598, which seemed so full of 
hope for Spenser, saw the culmination of another 
of those wild rebellions which swept over Ireland 
so frequently in the reign of Elizabeth. Spenser 
was " living among ruins. An English home in 
Ireland, however fair, was a home on the sides 
of iEtna or Vesuvius: it stood where the lava 
46 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

flood had once passed, and upon not distant 
fires." The poet was not blind to the dangers 
amid which he lived. His report to Elizabeth, 
and his prose work giving a " View of the Pres- 
ent State of Ireland," witness to his clear knowl- 
edge of the political unrest by which he was 
surrounded. Still, he can hardly have thought 
that danger was so near, for the wild onrush of 
the rebels in October found him utterly unpre- 
pared to resist their attack on Kilcolman Castle. 
That attack was only too successful. The poet, 
with his wife and children, had to fly for their 
lives, and the building was given to the flames. 
Ben Jonson told that a new-born child of Spen- 
ser's perished in the burning castle, but happily 
there are no valid reasons for crediting that 
assertion; the picture is dark enough without 
that added touch. 

It is a mistake to think that the Minister 
rebellion drove Spenser from Ireland. He and 
his family made their way to Cork, and there 
they were secure from further attack. The fact 
that his wife and children did not leave the 
country is proof that the rebels had done their 
worst by burning Kilcolman, and that there was 
no more to fear from them. Also, it is to be 
remembered that Sir Thomas Norreys, the Pres- 

47 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

ident of Minister, sought safety in Cork, thereby 
bringing upon himself a severe rebuke from the 
Government for his cowardice. If Cork had 
not been a secure retreat, there would have 
been no sting in the rebuke. No, it was not 
the rebellion which sent Spencer across the 
Irish Channel again ; he went as the bearer of a 
dispatch from Sir Thomas Norreys, being chosen 
for that errand, probably, because his personal 
knowledge might be useful to the authorities 
in London. Norreys wrote his dispatch on De- 
cember 9th and committed it to Spenser's care. 
The poet was going home for the last time. 

Between the writing of the dispatch and 
its delivery at Whitehall, fifteen days elapsed. 
Perchance the poet had a stormy passage, and 
with nerves and body shattered by the bitter 
experiences of the previous months, this may 
have set the seal on his fate. He was but forty- 
six years old ; some explanation seems necessary 
for his being suddenly cut down in the prime of 
life. He was able, it seems, to deliver his dis- 
patch on December 24th, and then we lose sight 
of him until the 16th of the following month. 
On that day he died. 

Tradition, in the person of Ben Jonson, has 
invested the death-bed of Spenser with uncalled- 

4-8 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

for and unbelievable pathos. " He died," Jonson 
told Drummond, " for want of bread in King 
Street ; he refused 20 pieces sent him by my 
Lord Essex, and said he was sure he had no 
time to spend them." This legend of starvation 
was repeated by other writers, but no evidence 
has been adduced in its support. No student 
of Spenser s life could so far forget his facts as 
to affirm that the poet had attained a state of 
affluence at his death ; on the other hand, it is 
impossible for him to believe that death ensued 
from actual want of bread. For, consider the 
facts of the case. Spenser was now Sheriff of 
the county of Cork, and he had come to London 
as messenger of the President of Minister to the 
English Court. If he had been in extreme mon- 
etary need on his arrival in London, there were 
many in the capital who would at once have 
relieved his wants. The scene of his death, a 
tavern in King Street, Westminster, also tells 
against the starvation legend. King Street, then 
the only highway between the Royal Palace 
of Whitehall and the Parliament House, was 
a street of considerable importance, and Spen- 
ser's presence there is explained by Stow's re- 
mark that "for the accommodation of such as 
come to town in the terms, here are some good 
4 49 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

inns for their reception, and not a few taverns 
for entertainment, as is not unusual in places of 



m 






//k 



m m 
















Sixteenth Century Plan of Westminster. Showing King 
Street, where Spenser died 



great confluence." There are ample proofs, too, 
that King Street was the usual resort of those 
who were messengers to the Court, such as 

50 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Spenser then was. Happily, then, there are no 
grounds for believing that the poet died for 
want of bread ; it was tragedy enough that 
such a life should have gone out at so early 
an age. 

There was but one burial place for Spenser — 
that Abbey in which the dust of Chaucer had 
already consecrated Poets' Corner to be the sep- 
ulture of England's sweet singers. It is said 
that Spenser asked a resting-place near that sa- 
cred dust, and such a wish was natural in one 
who knew he was Chaucer's lineal successor. 
Lord Essex defrayed the charges of the funeral, 
and poets bore the pall and cast upon the coffin 
their elegies and the pens with which they were 
written. Although Spenser had achieved his 
chief work on Irish soil, it was given him to 
rest at home at last. 

" 'T is well ; 't is something ; we may stand 
Where he in English earth is laid." 

According to a passage in Browne's " Britan- 
nia's Pastorals," Spenser was fated to be robbed 
of Queen Elizabeth's bounty even in the grave. 
Browne narrates how the Queen gave explicit 
orders for the building of a costly tomb over the 
poet's remains, and then adds : 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" The will had been performance, had not Fate, 
That never knew how to commiserate, 
Suborned curst Avarice to lie in wait 
For that rich prey (gold is a taking bait) : 
Who, closely lurking like a subtle snake 
Under the covert of a thorny brake, 
Seized on the factor by fair Thetis sent, 
And robbed our Colin of his monument." 

But Spenser did not lack for a monument, 
although it was more than twenty years after 




Spenser's Tomb 



his death before such a memorial was supplied 
through the generosity of Anne Clifford, Count- 
ess of Dorset. A hundred and fifty years after, 
that monument had fallen into decay, but its 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

appearance is faithfully reproduced by the exist- 
ing marble, which was erected by subscription in 
1778 at the instigation of the poet Mason. It 
will be seen that the inscription differs in two 
particulars from the accepted dates of Spenser's 
life, giving 1553 instead of 1552 as the date of his 
birth, and 1598 instead of 1599 as the year of his 
death. 

Several portraits (in oils) of Spenser are in ex- 
istence, and at least one miniature. The latter 
may be dismissed as wholly unsatisfactory. There 
is nothing of the Elizabethan atmosphere about 
it, and its subject is a nondescript character wholly 
out of keeping with the pronounced personality 
of the author of the " Faerie Queene." The other 
portraits may be divided into two classes, repre- 
sented respectively by the canvas at Duplin 
Castle and that which was formerly in the posses- 
sion of Lord Chesterfield. It is impossible to 
reconcile these portraits ; they are of men utterly 
dissimilar ; they have absolutely nothing in com- 
mon. All who have compared them must regard 
it as little short of a misfortune that the Lord 
Chesterfield painting is that which has generally 
been followed in the engraved portraits of the 
poet ; it is hardly less satisfactory than the mini- 
ature. On the other hand, the Duplin portrait 

53 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

seems to prove its own authenticity. There is an 
excellent replica of this portrait, from the brush 
of Sir Henry Raeburn, in the possession of Earl 
Spencer at Althorp, and the accompanying repro- 
duction of a photograph taken recently from that 




Edmund Spenser 
From the Portrait in the possession of Earl Spencer 

canvas may be confidently left to create its own 
justification as the most reliable likeness of the 
poet. There is a note on the back of the portrait, 
which, taken in conjunction with the fact that 
Raeburn made the copy in 1820, appears to offer 
inferential evidence in favour of this likeness. 

54 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

The note is to the following effect : " Another 
original portrait of this great poet was known to 
have been at Castle Saffron in the county of Cork, 
Ireland, situated in the neighbourhood of Kilcol- 
man Castle, the residence of Spenser, which was 
destroyed by fire before his death. This picture, 
in consequence of the roof of Castle Saffron fall- 
ing in from neglect, was utterly destroyed, a fact 
ascertained by Admiral Sir Benj. Halliwell, dur- 
ing the period of his command in chief of the port 
of Cork in 1818, at the request of George John 
Earl Spencer, K.G." 

Perhaps the chief evidence for the authenticity 
of the portrait accompanying these pages is the 
surprising manner in which it harmonises with 
the character of Spenser. This, at any rate, is a 
man of whom the " Faerie Queene " might be 
expected. There is an aloofness in the expression 
which may well have mirrored to the outward 
world the spirit of one who dwelt apart in a 
"happy land of Faerie." 



55 



II 

THE HOME OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 



II 

THE HOME OF SIR PHILIP SIDNEY 

" For a dearer life 
Never in battle hath been offered up, 
Since in like cause and in unhappy day, 
By Zutpheris walls the peerless Sidney fell." 

Robert South ey. 

Sir Philip Sidney is the enigma of the Eliza- 
bethan age. His span of life was but a brief 
thirty-two years, and as the first twenty years of 
any man's career are but a preparation for the 
activities of after-life, Sidney had only twelve 
years in which to impress himself on English 
history and win his renown. But they sufficed. 
After the lapse of more than three centuries his 
fame shines as brightly in the annals of Eng- 
land as that of Spenser, of Raleigh, of Drake, 
of Shakespeare, and of other Elizabethan im- 
mortals, against whose names there are recorded 
achievements far surpassing anything Sidney 
ever accomplished. 

As great deeds went in England in the closing 
half of the sixteenth century, Sidney did nothing 

59 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

great. He made the grand tour as a recognised 
necessary part of a liberal education in those 
days ; he was sent to Vienna on a small embassy 
of condolence ; he was appointed cup-bearer to 
Queen Elizabeth ; he addressed a surprisingly 
bold epistle to his sovereign in opposition to her 
contemplated marriage with the Duke of Anjou ; 
and, finally, as Earl Leicester's companion, he 
was named Governor of Flushing. This record, 
even with his literary work thrown in, offers no 
explanation of the persistence of Sidney's fame. 
He lives, really, by the heroism of his death, 
and that heroism was the natural flower of his 
rare character, and that character was moulded 
into its fine quality by a wise father and a ten- 
der mother in Sidney's happy boyhood days at 
Penshurst. 

When Musidorus, escaped from shipwreck, 
accompanied his two shepherd friends to the 
house of Kalender in Arcadia, he found himself 
in the presence of a building made " of fair and 
strong stone, not effecting so much any extraordi- 
nary kind of fineness as an honorable presenting 
of a firm stateliness. The lights, doors, and stairs 
rather directed to the use of the guest than to 
the eye of the artificer, and yet as the one chiefly 
heeded so the other not neglected ; each place 
60 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

handsome without loathsomeness ; not so dainty 
as not to be trod on, nor yet slubberd up with 
good fellow-ships ; all more lasting than beautiful 




but that the consideration of the exceeding last- 
ingness made the eye believe it was exceedingly 
beautiful. The back side of the house was neither 
field, garden, nor orchard, or rather it was both 
field, garden, and orchard, for as soon as the de- 
61 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

scending of the stairs had delivered them (that is, 
Musidorus and Kalender) down they came into 
a place cunningly set with trees of the most 
taste-pleasing fruits ; but scarcely had they taken 
that into their consideration but that they were 
suddenly stepped into a delicate green thicket, 
and behind the thickets again new beds of 
flowers, which being underneath the trees were 
to them a pavilion, and they were to the trees a 
mosaical floor, so that it seemed that that art 
therein would needs be delighted by counterfeit- 
ing his enemy error and making order in confu- 
sion. In the midst of all the place was a fair 
pond, whose shaking crystal was a perfect mirror 
to all the other beauties, so that it bare show of 
two gardens, one in deed the other in shadows." 

So wrote Sidney in the " Arcadia," and the 
model he had in mind was undoubtedly that 
stately Penshurst home in which he had his 
birth. 

In all the fair county of Kent there is prob- 
ably no more picturesque village than Penshurst. 
Its beauty is that of the past. Modernity has 
no footing here. Elizabethan types are renewed 
in an Edwardian age. As the daisy of to-day 
fashions itself by unerring heredity into the like- 
ness of the daisy of five centuries ago, so the 
62 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Penshurst cottage homes of the twentieth century 
perpetuate the semblance of those village homes 
which clustered about the mansion of the Sidneys 
in the sixteenth century. Example and authority 
account for this persistence of type. The ex- 
ample is there in the quaint half-timbered dwell- 
ings of the fifteenth century which overhang the 
pathway that gives entrance to the quiet church- 
yard ; the authority, in the wise determination 
of the lord of the manor that any old building 
which has become unfit for habitation shall be 
replaced by one bearing exact likeness to that 
it has displaced. Thus the newest houses look 
as ancient as the oldest. 

Penshurst Place is not exempt from this rule 
which enforces continuity with the past. Al- 
though various additions have been made to the 
mansion, the harmony of its outward semblance 
is undisturbed. Between the old banqueting 
hall of the fourteenth century and the new wing 
of the nineteenth century there is no discord ; 
loyalty to the past has shaped every new stone 
and fitted it so deftly into its place that even the 
old builders themselves would be deceived could 
they revisit the work of their hands. 

Although Penshurst has been the residence 
of a noble family almost from the time of the 
63 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Norman Conquest, it was not until the middle 
of the sixteenth century that it became the 
home of the Sidneys. It was to Sir William 
Sidney, a great favourite and faithful servant of 
Henry VIII, that Edward VI, in the year of 
his death, granted the manor of Penshurst. But 




Penshurst Place 



Sir William had brief enjoyment of the gift, 
dying as he did in the year in which he received 
it. His son, Sir Henry Sidney, the father of 
Philip, succeeded, and he, in 1585, erected the 
tower which now forms the central feature of 
the north front. Over the gateway of this tower 
is still to be seen a stone tablet bearing an in- 
scription which reads thus : 

64 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" The most religious and renowned Prince 
Edward the Sixth, Kinge of England, France 
and Ireland, gave this house of Pencester with 
the mannors, landes and appurtences thereunto 
belongings, unto his trustye and well-beloved 
servant, Syr William Sidney, Knight Bannaret, 
servinge him from the tyme of his birth unto his 
coronation, in the offices of chamberlayne and 
stuarde of his household, in commemoration of 
which most worthie and famous Kinge, Sir 
Henry Sidney, Knight of the most noble order 
of the garter, Lord President of the Council 
established in the Marches of Wales, sonne and 
heyre of the afore named Syr William Sidney, 
caused this tower to be buylded and that most 
excellent Prince's arms to be errected anno 
domino 1585." 

Other additions to Penshurst owe their exist- 
ence to Sir Henry Sidney, but it is his greatest 
glory that here he moulded the character of his 
illustrious son, Philip. The room in which he was 
born on November 29, 1554, is still pointed out, 
and scattered through the house are portraits and 
relics which serve the imagination liberally in 
its pleasant task of picturing the image of this 
noble youth. Among the family manuscripts is 

5 65 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

one document which goes far towards explaining 
how he became what we know him to have been. 
This is the first letter ever written by Sir Henry 
to his son, then at school at Shrewsbury, Eng- 
land, and as the lapse of three centuries has not 
rendered its advice obsolete nor its spirit less 
worthy of imitation, it may be quoted almost in 
full. After acknowledging the receipt of two 
letters from his son, one in Latin and the other 
in French, Sir Henry proceeds : 

" Since this is my first letter that ever I did 
write to you, I will not that it be all empty of 
some advices, which my natural care for you pro- 
voketh me to wish you to follow, as documents 
to you in this your tender age. Let your first 
action be the lifting of your mind to Almighty 
God by hearty prayer ; and feelingly digest the 
words you speak in prayer, with continued medi- 
tation and thinking of Him to whom you pray 
and of the matter for which you pray. And use 
this as an ordinary act, and at an ordinary hour, 
whereby the time itself shall put you in remem- 
brance to do that which you are accustomed to 
do in that time. Apply your study to such 
hours as your discreet master doth assign you, 
earnestly ; and the time I know he will so limit 
66 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

as shall be both sufficient for your learning and 
safe for your health. And mark the sense of 
the matter of that you read, as well as the words. 
So shall you both enrich your tongue with words 
and your wit with matter ; and judgment will 
grow as years groweth in you. Be humble and 
obedient to your master for unless you frame 
yourself to obey others, yea, and feel in yourself 
what obedience is, you shall never be able to 
teach others how to obey you. Be courteous 
of gesture and affable to all men, with diversity 
of reverence according to the dignity of the per- 
son : there is nothing that winneth so much with 
so little cost. Use moderate diet, so as after 
your meal you may find your wit fresher and not 
duller, and your body more lively and not more 
heavy. Seldom drink wine, and yet sometimes 
do, lest being enforced to drink upon the sudden 
you should find yourself inflamed. Use exercise 
of body yet such as is without peril of your 
joints and bones, it will increase your force and 
enlarge your breath. Delight to be cleanly, as 
well in all parts of your body as in your gar- 
ments : it shall make you grateful in each com- 
pany, and otherwise loathsome. Give yourself 
to be merry for you degenerate from your father 
if you find not yourself most able in wit and 
67 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

body and to do anything when you be most 
merry ; but let your mirth be ever void of all 
scurrility and biting words to any man, for a 
wound given by a word is often-times harder 
to be cured than that which is given with the 
sword. . . . Think upon every word that you 
will speak before you utter it, and remember 
how nature hath ramparted up, as it were, the 
tongue with teeth, lips, yea, and hair without 
the lips, and all betokening reins or bridles for 
the loose use of that member. Above all things 
tell no untruth ; even, in trifles : the custom of 
it is naughty. . . . Remember, my son, the noble 
blood you are descended of, by your mother's 
side ; and think that only by virtuous life and 
good action you may be an ornament to that 
illustrious family, and otherwise, through vice and 
sloth you shall be counted 'labes generis,' one 
of the greatest curses that can happen to man." 

To this notable letter, Philip's mother, Lady 
Mary Sidney, added a postscript which is as re- 
markable for its loving reverence for her husband 
as for its affectionate solicitude for her son. Let- 
ter and postscript, reflecting as in a mirror the 
characters of Sir Henry and Lady Sidney, ex- 
plain the high abstracted life of their son and 

68 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

give us the clue to the heroism of his death. It 
is easy to imagine the days of his boyhood at 
Penshurst. Ever before him was the image of 
parents who never faltered in their love for each 
other and were never divided in the authority 
with which they shaped the lives of their chil- 
dren. Yet that authority was far removed from 
austerity. Firm it doubtless was, but loving, 
and seasoned with innocent mirth. Nothing of 
good repute was lacking in the childhood envi- 
ronment of Philip Sidney ; from his earliest days 
he breathed the atmosphere of a home where all 
that tended to make life joyous and strong had 
free entrance. 

Whether roaming about the park or through 
the spacious rooms of this old-world mansion, 
the visitor is ever confronted with memorials of 
an age of men long passed away. When Philip 
Sidney was born, an oak was planted in the park 
to celebrate the coming of Sir Henry's heir, and 
Ben Jonson, in his day, could describe it as 

" That taller tree which of a truth was set 
At his great birth, when all the muses met." 

That birthday tree is gone ; it was cut down in 
1768 ; but there still exists the " Sidney Oak," 
a veteran of many centuries, in whose shadow 
Philip often sat while framing his own verse or 
69 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

discussing with Spenser the stanzas of the 
" Shepherds Calender " or the scheme of the 
" Faerie Queene." For when Spenser returned 
to London after his sojourn in the north of 
England on the completion of his college days 
at Cambridge, and was casting about for an oc- 
cupation in life, he was the guest of Sidney at 
Penshurst, and there saw in tangible flesh the 
high-souled man who became for him the ideal 
of a perfect knight and gentleman. It was at 
Penshurst, there is every reason for believing, 
that Spenser prepared his " Shepherds Calender " 
for the press, and his companionship with Sidney 
there accounts for his issuing that work under the 
shelter of a dedication to his " noble and virtuous " 
host. It accounts, too, for Sidney figuring so 
largely in the little poem with which he prefaced 
the book. 

" Goe, little booke ! thy selfe present, 
As child whose parent is unkent, 
To him that is the president 
Of Noblesse and of chevalree. 
And if that Envie barke at thee, 
As sure it will, for succoure flee 
Under the shadow of his wing ; 
And asked who thee forth did bring, 
A shepherds swaine, saye, did thee sing 
All as his straying flocke he fedde ; 
And, when his honor has thee redde, 
Crave pardon for my hardyhedde. 
70 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Among the rich and rare collections of armour 
adorning the corridors and rooms of the mansion 
is Sidney's helmet, bearing his familiar porcupine 
crest, and elsewhere is to be seen a fragment of 
his shaving-glass, enclosed in a rude frame. Then 
there are numerous portraits of the hero, in one 
of which he has for companion his brother Robert, 
the first Earl of Leicester. Not less interesting 
are the portraits of his mother, Lady Mary Sid- 
ney, and that sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 
for whose amusement in the time of her travail 
with her first-born he wrote his "Arcadia." 

Each stately apartment of Penshurst is replete 
with historical relics. In the ballroom, which is 
the first to be visited, there is a bushel measure 
made from gun metal captured in the fight with 
the Spanish Armada, and overhead there hang 
three priceless chandeliers, the gift of Queen 
Elizabeth to Sir Henry Sidney. It is comforting 
to know that her Majesty did give Sir Henry 
something, for it is certain that his services on her 
behalf as Lord President of Wales and Lord 
Deputy of Ireland made him immensely poorer 
in worldly goods if they enriched him with honour. 
But it is probable that those chandeliers were 
much more than paid for by the hospitality Eliz- 
abeth received on her visit to Penshurst. The 

73 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

apartment next to the ballroom is still known 
as Queen Elizabeth's Room, and here may yet 
be seen the suite of furniture made specially in 
honour of her visit and for her use. Her arm- 
chair is in the centre of the apartment, and by 
the aid of a portrait on the wall it is easy to recall 
the figure of the Virgin Queen and seat her once 
more in its capacious depths. Close by stands 
the card-table for which Elizabeth worked the 
embroidered top, and in front of that is the black 
velvet stool upon which Queen Victoria knelt at 
her coronation in Westminster Abbey. Other 
royal relics may be sought in the tiny Pages' 
Closet which opens off the Tapestry Room. This 
small chamber has now become the storeroom for 
the family china, and here are preserved Queen 
Elizabeth's dessert service and Queen Anne's 
breakfast set. The dessert service has for its 
ground color a lovely shade of green such as is 
not seen in modern china, and the breakfast set 
of Anne is of exquisite blue and white porcelain. 
In the picture gallery, a noble apartment 
ninety feet in length, are sufficient objects of 
virtu to make the fame of two or three museums. 
Side by side may be seen a quaint old clock with 
a horizontal brass face and a curious old lamp 
which was intended to measure time rather than 
74 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

shed light. At the opposite ends of the widened 
recess are two costly cabinets, and near one of 
these is a richly decorated spinet which was made 
in Rome in 1680 for Christina, Queen of Sweden. 
In this room, too, are a pair of riding-boots which 
belonged to Algernon Sidney, that premature 
republican who lost his head on the testimony of 
a book he had written but had not published. 

Penshurst has gathered other interesting asso- 
ciations than those immediately concerned with 
Sir Philip Sidney. Ben Jonson was a frequent 
visitor here, and his visits have left their impress 
on his verse. In " The Forest," for example, there 
occurs a lengthy description of Penshurst, in the 
midst of which we happen upon a pleasing picture 
of the kindly relationship which existed between 
its noble owners and the retainers of the estate. 

" And though thy walls be of the country stone, 
They 're reared with no man's ruin, no man's groan; 
There 's none that dwell about them wish them down. 
But all come in, the farmer and the clown, 
And no one empty-handed to salute 
Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. 
Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, 
Some nuts, some apples, some think they make 
The better cheeses, bring them ; or else send 
By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend 
This way to husbands, and whose baskets bear 
An emblem of themselves in plum or pear." 
77 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Nor should Algernon Sidney be forgotten. 
Next to Sir Philip he is the best known mem- 
ber of his famous house. Even in his youth he 
was credited with a " huge deal of wit and much 
sweetness of nature." Among the stanchest of 
his friends was William Penn, the founder of 
Pennsylvania, and it was at Penshurst the two 
drew up between them the fundamental articles 
of the Pennsylvania constitution. He had bit- 
ter experience of the gratitude of kings. Two 
of Charles's children found a haven at Pens- 
hurst when the fortunes of the Royal house 
were wrecked by the Commonwealth, and a 
third, Charles II, rewarded the brutal Judge 
Jeffreys with a costly ring for his services at 
the mock trial which sent Algernon to the 
scaffold ! 

One other memory links itself with Penshurst, 
and this time it is a woman's fair form that fills 
the imagination. Algernon Sidney had a sister 
named Dorothy, and it was her fate to awaken 
a passionate love in the heart of Edmund Waller. 
He wooed her with all a poet's intensity, and bent 
his muse to the service of his desire. Penshurst 
and his poems perpetuate his passion to this day. 
In the affected language of the seventeenth cen- 
tury, he christened his ideal with the name of 
78 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Saccharissa, and Lady Dorothy Sidney has lost 
her title in her lover's endearing epithet. Over 




Saccharissa 's Sitting-room 



the gateway of the inner courtyard is the window 
of " Saccharissa's Sitting-room," and the stately 
avenue of lofty beeches by which the mansion is 

79 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



approached from the east is known as " Saccha- 
rissa's Walk." It is to that avenue Waller alludes 
in the following lines : 




Saccharissa's Walk 

" Ye lofty beeches, tell this matchless dame, 
That if together ye fed all one flame, 
It would not equalize the hundredth part 
Of what her eyes have kindled in my heart ! 
80 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Go, boy, and carve this passion on the bark 
Of yonder tree, which stands the sacred mark 
Of noble Sidney's birth ; and when such benign, 
Such more than mortal-making stars did shine ; 
That there they cannot but for ever prove 
The monument and pledge of humble love : 
His humble love, whose hope shall ne'er rise higher, 
Than for a pardon that he dares admire." 

It was all in vain. Neither Waller's bold 
hyperbole nor his pretence of humility had any 
power over Saccharissa's heart. She looked for 
a higher social status than Waller could give, 
and eventually became the Countess of Sunder- 
land. But Waller had his revenge. When Sac- 
charissa had lost both her husband and her youth, 
she, on meeting the poet, thoughtlessly asked 
when he would again write such verses upon her. 
"When," replied he, "you are as young, Madam, 
and as handsome as you were then." 



81 



Ill 

MEMORIALS OF WILLIAM PENN 



Ill 

MEMORIALS OF WILLIAM PENN 

" It should be sufficient for the glory of William Perm, that he 
stands upon record as the most humane, the most moderate, and 
the most pacific of all rulers." Lord Jeffrey. 

Deep in a shady dell, about a mile and a half 
from that village of Chalfont St. Giles in which 
Milton took refuge when the plague was raging 
in London, stands the Quaker meeting-house of 
Jordans. Living or dead, no member of the 
Society of Friends could wish to find himself in 
a spot more in harmony with the simple tenets 
of his creed. As the meeting-house breaks 
upon the vision through the stately trees by 
which it is surrounded, it seems as if one had 
been vouchsafed a glimpse of New England in 
Old England ; it is just such a building as was 
common in the New World what time the 
religious refugees of Britain, late in the seven- 
teenth century, crossed the seas in search of 
that liberty of conscience denied them in the old 
home. On such rude wooden benches as still 

85 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

remain under that red-tiled roof, no rule of life 
and faith would be more seemly than that 
preached by George Fox ; and than that simple 
God's acre which fronts the meeting-house there 
could be no fitter resting-place in which to await 
in quiet confidence that Day which will prove 
how far that creed was in harmony with absolute 
truth. 

For several miles around, this district is rich 
in memories of the early Quakers. Near by was 
the peaceful home of the Penningtons, in which 
Thomas Ellwood was living as tutor, and from 
which William Penn was to take his first and 
most beloved wife. General Fleetwood, too, had 
his residence in the neighbourhood. The reason 
for this focussing of so many Friends within a 
small area was probably the same as that which 
drove the Covenanters of Scotland to seek 
refuge on the lonely moors ; to-dajf Jordans is 
sufficiently inaccessible, and two centuries ago 
it must have been an ideal haven for suspected 
sectaries. 

More than two hundred years have elapsed 
since Jordans passed into the possession of the 
Society of Friends. It owes its name probably 
to a forgotten owner of the property ; for it was 
not from a Jordan, but from one William Rus- 

80 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

sell, that, in 1671, Thomas Ellwood and several 
others acquired the land in behalf of the Society. 
The idea of a meeting-house seems to have been 
an after-thought ; it was as a burial-place simply 
that Jordans was originally purchased. But the 




Church of All Hallows Barking, London, where William 
Penn was Baptised 



meeting-house was not long in following, for 
seventeen years later there is authentic record 
of its existence. Probably some generations 
have passed since regular meetings were held 
in this rude temple ; but twice every year — 
on the fourth Sunday in May and the first 
Thursday in June — set gatherings are held to 

87 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

keep alive the continuity of Quaker teaching 
within these walls. 

But it is because of its graves, and not on ac- 
count of its meeting-house, that Jordans attracts 
so many pilgrims year by year. For a century 
and a half there was nothing to distinguish one 
mouldering heap from another. Here, for ex- 
ample, is the account which Mr. William Hep- 
worth Dixon, one of Penn's most competent 
biographers, wrote of his visit to the place in 
1851 : " Nothing could be less imposing than the 
graveyard at Jordans : the meeting-house is like 
an old barn in appearance, and the field in which 
the illustrious dead repose is not even decently 
smoothed. There are no gravel walks, no monu- 
ments, no mournful yews, no cheerful flowers ; 
there is not even a stone to mark a spot or to 
record a name. When I visited it with my 
friend Granville Penn, Esq., great-grandson of 
the State-Founder, on the 11th of January this 
year, we had some difficulty in determining the 
heap under which the great man's ashes lie. Mis- 
takes have occurred before now ; and for many 
years pilgrims were shown the wrong grave ! " 

With the laudable desire of helping pilgrims 
to pay their devotions at the right shrine, Mr. 

88 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Dixon prepared a simple ground-plan of the 
graveyard, and the positions of the small head- 
stones which mark the graves to-day correspond 
with that plan to a large extent. But there is 
one important exception. It will be seen from 




Jordans Meeting-house 



one of the pictures that the stone nearest to 
the fence in the second row bears the name of 
" John Penn," whereas in Mr. Dixon's plan that 
position marks the grave of "John Pennington." 
It is not easy to throw any light on this mistake. 
For instance, it is difficult to see what John 
Penn could be buried under the date given, 
89 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

1746 ; certainly not the grandson who occupied 
Stoke Park and was responsible, in 1799, for 
that ponderous cenotaph to the memory of Gray. 
The grave is undoubtedly more likely to be that 
of a Pennington, a member of the family to 
which William Penn's first wife belonged. The 
mystery about this particular grave makes all 
the more unmeaning the attempt to desecrate 
it, which occurred some time back. 

It lends a pathetic interest to this lonely 
graveyard to visit it fresh from a perusal of 
Thomas Ellwood's simple autobiography. All 
those who sleep so quietly under these modest 
headstones figure more or less in his pages ; 
they become known to us in all their quaint 
Quaker habits and beliefs, and appeal to us 
with the tender sentiment of a bygone age. 
Penn had two wives and eleven children, of 
whom both wives and seven of the children 
keep him company here. 

Next to Penn himself, the memory which 
most dominates this burial-place is that of Guli 
Penn, his first wife. Ellwood knew her in Lon- 
don as a child ; became her playfellow ; used 
to "ride with her in her little coach, drawn 
by her footman about Lincoln's Inn Fields." 
She was the daughter of Sir William Springett, 
90 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

who fell in Cromwell's army, and her mother 
afterwards became the wife of Isaac Penning- 
ton. Other children were born to Isaac Penn- 
ington and Lady Springett, and as tutor to 
those children Ellwood was for many years in 




Interior of Jordans Meeting-house 



daily converse with Guli Springett. He had 
an ample opportunity, then, to win her for his 
own ; and he was not " so stupid nor so di- 
vested of all humanity as not to be sensible of 
the real and innate worth and virtue which 
adorned that excellent dame." Outsiders talked, 
of course. Ellwood had not joined the Quakers 
91 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

for nothing ; his motive was the conquest of 
Guli and the annexation of her fortune ; if he 
could not get her by fair means, why then, of 
course, he would run away with her and marry 
her. Such pleasant gossip reached the ears 
of the Penningtons and their tutor ; but the 
former did not lose confidence and the latter 
did not pluck up courage to make the gossip 
true. For Guli Springett was worth winning. 
" In all respects," says the meek Ellwood, " a very 
desirable woman — whether regard was had to 
her outward person, which wanted nothing to 
render her completely comely ; or to the en- 
dowments of her mind, which were every way 
extraordinary and highly obliging ; or to her 
outward fortune, which was fair." Ell wood's 
subsequent wooing showed that he did not de- 
serve such a prize. Guli did not lack for suit- 
ors ; but towards them all, " till he at length 
came for whom she was reserved, she carried 
herself with so much evenness of temper, 
such courteous freedom guarded with the 
strictest modesty, that, as it gave encourage- 
ment or ground of hopes to none, so neither did 
it administer any matter of offence or just cause 
of complaint to any." The " he " for whom she 
was " reserved " was William Penn. Happening 
92 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

to visit Ellwood at the Penningtons, he saw, 
was enslaved, and then conquered. Twenty-two 
years of wedded happiness were meted out to 
these two, and then Guli Penn was laid to rest 
at Jordans. 

Perhaps it spoils something of the romance 
that Penn took a second wife, even though it 
is always affirmed that Guli ever remained his 
favourite spouse. Was Hannah Callowhill con- 
scious of that fact ? Those lovers of Guli Penn 
who are knights-errant of her memory will per- 
haps wickedly hope that she was. This sec- 
ond wife, at any rate, has left little impress in 
the life of her husband ; that she bore him six 
children and that from one of her sons the pres- 
ent representatives of the male branch of the 
family are descended is about all that has to 
be recorded. If the testimony of the headstone 
must be accepted, — and there are doubts on that 
point, — then Hannah Penn lies in the same 
grave with her husband, while the lovable Guli 
sleeps apart by herself in the grave to the left. 
Next to her is her mother, inscribed on the head- 
stone simply as " Mary Pennington " and not as 
Lady Springett. She appears to have put off 
her title with her widow's weeds ; and in any 
case such " worldly " honours can hardly expect 
93 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

perpetuation in a Quaker graveyard. And yet 
a letter among the manuscripts of the Duke 
of Portland proves that Penn himself was 
not wholly indifferent to the fascination of 
sounding titles. He is writing to Robert Harley 
on matters connected with Pennsylvania, and he 
weakly confesses that he asked for " some honor- 
ary mark, as a founder of the colony, viz., as the 
first — hereditary — Privy Councillor or Chief 
Justice, or the like, which I shall not insist upon, 
contenting myself with the rights of landlord and 
lord of the manor of the country." 

Isaac Pennington finds sepulture here too, and 
Penns married daughter Letitia, and his first- 
born son Springett, and five of his infant children, 
and Ellwood, and that wife of his whom he 
wooed in such a comically serious fashion. It is 
quite a reunion of the pugnacious men and the 
demure women who stand in such marked con- 
trast with each other in the memory of those 
familiar with Ellwood's pages. Peace to their 
memory, these controversial men, these mild- 
mannered women ! Perhaps they would not 
sleep so peacefully could they be conscious of 
the changes which have come over those who 
hold their creed to-day. Not to hear the " thee " 
and "thou," not to see the hat-covered head, — 
94 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

what pain this would be, especially to the ob- 
stinate Ellwood, whose father once threatened to 
knock the teeth down his throat if he " thee-ed " 
him again, and buffeted him about the head for 
persisting in wearing a hat in his presence ! Poor 
Ellwood ! Hat after hat was niched from him 







Graves of Penx and his Wives at Jordaxs 



by that irate father ; and when at last even his 
montero-cap was confiscated, and he was forced 
to go bareheaded, he caught such a cold in his 
face that his devoted sister had much ado to 
keep him poulticed with " figs and stoned raisins 
roasted." No doubt there are many cheaper 
martyrdoms than that. 

95 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Philadelphia often casts envious eyes towards 
the graveyard at Jordans. Is that Mr. Hep worth 
Dixon's fault ? In that account of his visit to 
Jordans, quoted above, he mentions Mr. Granville 
Penn's resolve to erect some simple but durable 
record over the graves, and then adds : " If this 
be not done, the neglect will only hasten the day 
on which his ancestor's remains will be carried off 
to America — their proper and inevitable home !" 
Dr. Dixon forgot that there must be two parties 
to such a bargain. Philadelphia did try to re- 
move the remains some years ago; but the trus- 
tees of the burial-ground objected, and the Home 
Secretary at once upheld the objection. And 
now a Philadelphian makes another suggestion. 
He wants a memorial to Penn erected near the 
Old Bailey in London — the scene of his vindica- 
tion of the right of a jury to render a verdict 
contrary to the dictation of a judge — and the 
ashes of the famous Quaker placed underneath. 
The suggestion calls up two pictures. One is of 
a grimy street in the heart of London, where the 
roar of traffic resounds from dawning day to past 
midnight, where stands the sombre building whose 
walls are fetid with the stains of inhuman crimes ; 
the other is of a grassy dell sentinelled with bosky 
trees, where a soft quietness broods through win- 
96 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

ter snows and summer sun, where there is little 
to suggest the depth of infamy to which the 
human heart can sink. What honour would it be 
to Penn to transplant his bones from Jordans to 
the Old Bailey ? Then there is Guli Perm, too, 
— shall that gentle spirit be ruthlessly bereaved ? 
Let them all sleep quietly on, these Quaker 
friends and lov r ers, till He shall waken them 
whose they are and whom they served. 



97 



IV 

THE BIRTHPLACE OF GRAY'S ELEGY 

L. OF C. 



IV 

THE BIRTHPLACE OF GRAY'S ELEGY 

" No, bard divine ! For many a care beguil'd 

Bi/ the sweet magic of thy soot/ting lay, 

For mam/ a raptur'd thought, and vision wild, 

To thee this strain of gratitude I pay." 

Thomas Warton. 

Grays " Elegy " is the Elegy of the English- 
speaking race. All its most outstanding qualities 
are native to the sea-girt isle in which that race 
had its origin. Many words and phrases in the 
poem only convey the full power of their emotion 
to the mind which can interpret them in the light 
and knowledge of English history and English 
rural life. The word " curfew " strikes a note 
mellow with memories of ages long gone by, and 
attunes the spirit to that pleasant melancholy 
which is the most profitable mood in which to 
read the poem. That " glimmering landscape " 
too, that " weary ploughman," that " drowsy tin- 
kling " of the unseen sheep, that " moping owl " 
complaining from the church's ivy-mantled tower, 
— all these things are English to the core. It is 
101 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

not difficult to understand why this "Elegy" 
holds its place of supreme honour among the 
people to whom it belongs. " It is a poem," 
writes Mr. Swinburne, " of such high perfection 
and such universal appeal to the tenderest and 
noblest depths of human feeling ; " and the same 
writer asserts that "as an elegiac poet, Gray 
holds for all ages to come his unassailable and 
sovereign station." 

When the eye of sense falls for the first time 
upon a scene hitherto beheld only by the eye of 
imagination, there often comes a painful feeling 
of disenchantment, an enevitable dispelling of 
much of the romance which gathered round the 
spot while it was still unseen. For the great 
majority, the churchyard in which Gray wrote his 
" Elegy " has its abode in the realm of fancy — 
how does it suffer by the critical test of coming 
within range of the seeing eye ? Frankly, let it 
be confessed that it suffers surprisingly little. It 
is true that the painful uniformity and glaring 
whiteness of the modern marble memorial stones 
which are becoming too plentiful jar upon the 
old-time sentiment with which the pilgrim ap- 
proaches this shrine, but these unlovely emblems 
of departed worth and surviving grief are happily 
removed a little distance from the church, and thus 
102 




Stoke Poge: 



IN OLD ENGLAND 



it happens that the older tombs preserve around 
the immediate vicinity of the building a scene 
which harmonises with the verse of Gray because 
it can have changed but little since his time. It 
is just such a scene as most imaginations would 
have pictured. Each object is easily recognised 
by the poet's description, and yet no one object 
is so sharp in Out- 
line as to remove it 
altogether from the 
sphere of imagina- 
tion. The only 
probable exception 
is the "ivy-mantled 
tower." The tower 
itself is in perfect 
harmony with the 

"Elegy," and its thickly clustered ivy still provides 
a secret bower for the descendants of the poet's 
"moping owl;" but the wooden spire which rises 
from its battlements seems to strike a note of dis- 
cord. For the rest, all is as it should be. Each 
picture in the poem has its faithful counterpart; 
the eyewitnesses to the fidelity with which the 
poet has caught the inner likeness of the mute ob- 
jects which sat for the models of his immortal can- 
vas. To the south a line of "rugged elms" stands 

105 




Stoke Poges Churchyard 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

guard by the churchyard wall, and in the sum- 
mer sun their shadows mingle with the yew-trees 
shade, beneath which, 

" Each in his narrow cell for ever laid, 
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep." 

If the fates were unkind to Gray in the father 
they gave him, the balance was generously read- 
justed in the person of his mother. Philip Gray, 
the father of the poet, is not to be credited with 
any share in his famous son's achievements ; all 
that we have to thank him for is a portrait of 
that son in his thirteenth year. He was a man 
of violent temper, extravagant in his habits, wholly 
wanting in his duty to his family, and so inhuman 
in his behaviour to his wife that that lady was 
actually dependent during the whole of her mar- 
ried life upon the labour of her own hands. The 
darkness of the fathers character serves as an 
excellent foil to throw that of the mother into 
relief. In a double sense Gray owed his life to 
her, for when he was still an infant she, finding 
the child in a fit, resorted to the desperate remedy 
of opening one of his veins with a pair of scissors, 
and so saved him from the early grave which her 
other eleven children found. Through all the fol- 
lowing years she watched with tender solicitude 
the life of the one child who was the sole harvest 
106 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of her travail, and when he was sent to Eton it 
was at her expense and not that of his father. 

To his mother, too, Gray owed his acquaint- 
ance with that lovely English county from which 
he was to gather the sweet pastoral images of 
his most famous poem. Although when Miss 
Dorothy Antrobus became the wife of Philip 
Gray she was keeping a milliner's shop in Corn- 
hill, London, in partnership with her sister Mary, 
she still retained an affectionate connection with 
Buckinghamshire, the county of her birth, one of 
her sisters being married to a prosperous lawyer 
who lived at Burnham. In the house of this 
uncle Gray spent his vacations from Eton, and 
thus began his acquaintance with the neighbour- 
ing parish of Stoke Poges and with that church- 
yard which was to have such a profound influence 
on his verse. Here also he discovered that forest of 
Arden which, by the name of Burnham Beeches, 
is now famous among all English-speaking 
people. " I have," he wrote in a vacation letter 
to Horace Walpole, " at the distance of half a 
mile, through a green lane, a forest (the vulgar 
call it a common) all my own, at least, as good 
as, for I spy no human thing in it but myself. 
It is a little chaos of mountains and precipices, 
— mountains, it is true, that do not ascend 
107 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

much above the clouds, nor are the declivities 
quite so amazing as Dover Cliff, but just such 
hills as people who love their necks as much as 
I do may venture to climb, and crags that give 
the eye as much pleasure as if they were most 
dangerous. Both vale and hill are covered with 
venerable beeches, and other very reverend vege- 
tables, that, like most other ancient people, are 
always dreaming out their old stories to the 
winds. At the foot of one of these squats Me 
(il pcnseroso) and there I grow to the trunk for 
a whole morning." 

Death was the chief cause of Gray becoming 
more intimately acquainted with Stoke Poges 
than had been possible during his Eton vaca- 
tions. When Philip Gray died in 1741, Dorothy 
Gray and her sister Mary doubtless realised that 
one of the strongest ties which held them to the 
metropolis had snapped, and when, about a year 
later, their sister in Buckinghamshire became a 
widow, the three ladies apparently resolved to 
end their days together in the county of their 
birth. Henceforward, — that is, from October, 
1742, — Gray had no home in London, but there 
was always open to him the peaceful haven 
which his mother and her two sisters had shaped 
for themselves at Stoke Poges. The house was 

108 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

situated at West End, in the northern part of 
the parish, where the present mansion of Stoke 
Court now stands. It is described as having 




Stoke Court 



been a simple farmhouse of two stories, with a 
rustic porch before the door, but the only apart- 
ments which survive from the old building are 
the poet's bedroom, the study, and the window 
above at which he used to sit. There yet exists 
109 




Gray's Bedroom 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

at Stoke Court, however, a still more interesting 

relic of the poet, in 
the summer-house in 
which he " used to sit 
and muse." It is a 
substantial stone-built 
structure, embowered 
in trees, and com- 
manding from the ris- 
ing ground on which 
it stands a far-reaching view of the surrounding 
country. Than this peaceful retreat it would be 
difficult to imagine a spot more in harmony with 
the pensive muse 
of Gray. As in 
the case of Words- 
worth, it may well 
have been that 
while the poet's 
books were to be 
found indoors, this 

SUmmer-hoUSe Was Gray's Study 

his study. Here, 

doubtless, the poet penned many of those lines 
which were to attain an unfailing immortal- 
ity. The outlook is still as calm and remote 
from the busy stir as when Gray described him- 
110 







IN OLD ENGLAND 

self as " still at Stoke, hearing, seeing, doing 
absolutely nothing." 

As death was instrumental in deepening Gray's 
intimacy with Stoke Poges, so also was the king 
of terrors responsible for creating in him that 
spirit of melancholy out of which the " Elegy " 
grew. One of the poet's dearest friends at 
Eton had been Richard West, who was denied 
any considerable span of life in which to ripen his 
undoubted genius. While on a visit to Stoke, 
Gray heard suddenly of the death of this early 
friend, and the loss tinged all his after life with 
sadness. The immediate issue of that loss may 
be traced in the poems written while his sorrow 
was still heavy upon him. One of these is the 
sonnet specially dedicated to West's memory. 

" In vain to me the smiling mornings shine, 

And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fire ; 
The birds in vain their amorous descant join ; 

Or cheerful fields resume their green attire ; 
These ears, alas ! for other notes repine, 

A different object do these eyes require ; 
My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine ; 

And in my breast the imperfect joys expire. 
Yet morning smiles the busy race to cheer, 

And new-born pleasure brings to happier men ; 
The fields to all their wonted tribute bear ; 

To warm their little loves the birds complain ; 
I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, 

And weep the more because I weep in vain." 
8 113 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Then there is the " Ode on a Distant Prospect 
of Eton College," the whole of which is suffused 
with that retrospective tenderness which is the 
dominant mood of the human mind under the 
influence of death. On the southern horizon 
seen from Stoke Poges the embattled outline of 
the Royal Castle of Windsor and the " antique 
towers " of Eton are plainly visible, and as Gray 
gazed upon these familiar objects while still in 
the throes of his lonely anguish, what was more 
natural than that his mind should revert to those 
lost days of his boyhood which he had spent 
there in the company of West? 

" Ah happy hills ! ah pleasing shade ! 

Ah fields beloved in vain ! 
Where once my careless childhood stray'd, 

A stranger yet to pain ! 
I feel the gales that from ye blow 
A momentary bliss bestow, 
As waving fresh their gladsome wing 
My weary soul they seem to soothe, 
And, redolent of joy and youth, 

To breath a second spring." 

Verses such as these are sufficient evidence of 
the sombre mood of Grays spirit during that sad 
autumn of 1742 ; his muse was surely ripening 
towards the full harvest of the " Elegy." One 
other event helping towards that fruition was to 
114 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

happen that autumn, and this was the death of 
that lawyer uncle in whose home the poet had 
spent so many of his holidays from Eton. Twice, 
thus, within a few short months the shadow of 
death fell upon Grays life, and in the gloom of 
those days " melancholy marked him for her 
own," and awakened the beginnings of that 
" Elegy " which was to give the English mind 
its most comforting channel of expression in any 
twilight hour. 

Although begun as the year 1742 waned to its 
close, the " Elegy " was not to be finished for a 
long time. It may be that Gray in the new life 
at Cambridge upon which he now entered found 
some relief from the mood in which the poem 
had its birth ; in any case, it was not until death 
was to touch him again nearly, in the person of 
one whom he loved, that the " Elegy " was fash- 
ioned to its completion. In November, 1749, 
news reached Gray at Cambridge that his aunt 
Mary — she who had been partner in the milli- 
ner s shop at Cornhill — had died suddenly, and 
he at once addressed to his mother the following 
tender-spirited letter : " The unhappy news I 
have just received from you equally surprises and 
afflicts me. I have lost a person I loved very 
much, and have been used to from my infancy, 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

but am much more concerned for your loss, the 
circumstances of which I forbear to dwell upon, 
as you must be too sensible of them yourself; 
and will, I fear, more and more need a consola- 
tion that no one can give, except He who had 
preserved her to you so many years, and at last, 
when it was His pleasure, has taken her from us 
to Himself; and perhaps, if we reflect upon what 
she felt in this life, we may look upon this as an 
instance of His goodness both to her and to those 
who loved her. . . . However you may deplore 
your own loss, yet think that she is at last easy 
and happy; and has now more occasion to pity 
us than we her. I hope, and beg, you will sup- 
port yourself with that resignation we owe to 
Him, who gave us our being for our good, and 
who deprives us of it for the same reason. I 
w r ould have come to you directly, but you do not 
say whether you desire I should or not ; if you 
do, I beg I may know it, for there is nothing to 
hinder me, and I am in very good health." 

It does not seem clear whether Gray did go to 
Stoke Poges at this time, but there is no doubt 
that the death of his aunt revived the mood in 
which the " Elegy " was begun, and led to its 
completion. He finished the poem at Stoke in 
June of the following year, and in sending a 
116 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

copy to Horace Walpole he wrote, " Having 
put an end to a thing whose beginning you have 
seen so long, I immediately send it to you. You 
will, I hope, look upon it in the light of a thing 
with an end to it ; a merit that most of my writ- 
ings have wanted and are likely to want." 




The Yew-tree's Shade " 



It is puerile, in the face of the overwhelming 
evidence available, to assert, as some have done, 
that the churchyard of the "Elegy" is not that 
of Stoke Poges. Even apart from that evidence, 
the testimony of the poem is conclusive on that 
point : he who visits Stoke Poges with the 
117 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" Elegy " written clearly on the tablets of his 
memory realises at once that here is the very 
scene from which its pictures were drawn; he 
will feel, as Mr. Edmund Gosse has said, " a cer- 
tain sense of confidence in the poet's sincerity." 
The harmony between the objective sights and 




Gray's Tomb 



the subjective recollections is perfect. The 
" ivy-mantled tower," the " rugged elms," the 
"yew-tree's shade," the frail memorials "with 
uncouth rhimes and shapeless sculpture decked," 
the "church-way path" — these all assert the 
truthfulness of the poet's picture, and prove that 

118 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

it was here and nowhere else he garnered the 
images of his immortal verse. 

In the fulness of time Gray himself was laid to 
rest in the peaceful graveyard of Stoke Poges, 
and thus the visitor thither has the added sad 
pleasure of pausing by the tomb of the poet 
whose verse was the motive of his pilgrimage. 
First to be laid in this grave was that aunt whose 
death he so deeply deplored, and then, four years 
later, there followed that tender mother to whom 
he owed so great a debt of affection. The in- 
scription on the tomb, written by Gray, reads 
thus : " In the vault beneath are deposited, in the 
hope of a joyful resurrection, the remains of Mary 
Antrobus. She died unmarried, Nov. 5, 1749, 
aged 66. In the same pious confidence, beside 
her friend and sister, here sleep the remains of 
Dorothy Gray, widow, the careful tender mother 
of many children, one of whom alone had the 
misfortune to survive her. She died March 11, 
1753, aged 67." Gray himself died in July, 
1771, and in his will he left explicit instructions 
that his body was to be " deposited in the vault, 
made by my late dear mother in the churchyard 
of Stoke Poges, near Slough in Buckinghamshire, 
by her remains." Of course this wish was re- 
spected, but there is no inscription on the tomb 
119 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

to show that the poet is buried there. In the 
wall of the church, however, close by, there is a 
stone which reads : " Opposite to this stone, in 
the same tomb upon which he has so feelingly 
recorded his grief at the loss of a beloved parent, 




Gray's Monument 

are deposited the remains of Thomas Gray, 
the author of the Elegy written in a country 
churchyard. He was buried August 6th, 1771." 
There is, however, a monument to the poet 
in the field adjoining the churchyard on the east. 
This takes the form of a massive cenotaph, and 
upon the four sides of the pedestal there are 
various inscriptions. Three of these are quota- 

120 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

tions from the poet's verses ; the fourth records 
that " This monument, in honour of Thomas 
Gray, was erected a. d. 1799, among the scenes 
celebrated by that great Lyric and Elegiac Poet. 
He died July 31, 1771, and lies unnoted, in the 
churchyard adjoining, under the tombstone in 
which he piously 
and pathetically 
recorded the in- 
terment of his 
aunt and lamented 
mother." The cost 
of this monument, 
and the stone in 

,i i i -i-i Stoke Poges Manor House 

the church wall, 

was generously borne by Mr. John Penn, a 
grandson of the founder of Pennsylvania. At 
the time of their erection, and indeed for some 
thirty years before, Stoke Poges Manor was in the 
possession of the Penn family. Since that date 
the property has been in the possession of several 
owners, but, happily, they have all realised that 
in many respects they were but the stewards of 
a heritage in which all lovers of the poet have a 
rightful share. 

One other association of Gray with Stoke 
Poges has still to be mentioned. Before the 

121 




LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" Elegy " was printed, Horace Walpole appears 
to have handed it about in manuscript form, and 
one copy was seen by Lady Cobham, who was 
then residing at Stoke Poges Manor House. By 
and by the lady was surprised to find that the 
author was living in the same parish, and she 
gladly availed herself of the services of two visit- 
ors to secure his acquaintance. These visitors, 
who were ladies, set off one day across the fields 
to the farmhouse at West End, and, not finding 
the poet at home, left such a message as made it 
compulsory on him to return the call. Out of 
this incident, and descriptive of it, grew Gray's 
humorous poem entitled " A Long Story," the 
closing scene of which is laid in the Manor 
House. 

It will be seen, then, how rich is the parish of 
Stoke Poges in associations with the memory 
of Gray. From early boyhood to ripe manhood 
these peaceful fields and lanes often filled his 
vision and ministered to his pensive spirit the 
tender balm of nature's sweetest comfort. Here, 
too, he experienced that love of kindred which 
was in part denied him in his own home, spend- 
ing those " quiet autumn days of every year so 
peacefully in loving and being loved by those 
three placid old ladies at Stoke, in a warm atmos- 

122 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

phere of musk and potpourri." But it is in the 
quiet churchyard the memory of the poet lives 
in its greatest intensity. So long as the pathos 
of lowly life appeals to the heart, so long as there 
is a soul not wholly lost to the charm of peaceful 
days spent in the " cool sequester'd vale of life," 
so long as the tender images of fading day and 
unavailing reminders of the dead have power to 
move the spirit — so long will this God's Acre 
keep green the memory of that poet whose verse 
abounds with " sentiments to which every bosom 
returns an echo." 



123 



V 
GILBERT WHITE'S SELBORNE 



GILBERT WHITE'S SELBORNE 

" Open the book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In 
our broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially gar- 
rulous Fellow of Oriel, and find refreshment instead of fatigue." 

James Russell Lowell. 

Such a village as Selborne opens wide the gates 
of that world of imagination in which poets 
dwell. True, there are some signs that the march 
of humanity has not paused these two hundred 
years, but they are so few and so tentative that 
they are unable to strike any effective discord. 
For the rest, the golden stain of time is over all. 
A beech-clad hill rises abruptly some three 
hundred feet on the south side of the village, 
and a narrow cleft in the trees gives a peep of 
the little rural world below. It is a picture of 
red and brown roofs in a frame of green. From 
the grey tower of the church comes hour by 
hour the monition of passing time ; and in the 
pauses of the warning bell there float upwards 
now and then such sounds of Nature life as were 
familiar in the far-off days of Chaucer. Nature 

127 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

has no chronology, no revolutions. Some of her 
children have fallen in the battle of life, and left 
no successors, but those who survive show few 
visible traces of the rlight of time. The song of 
the nightingale heard among these trees in the 
twilight to-day is 

" the same that oft-times hath 
Charm'd magic casements, opening on the foam 
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn." 

In the one long straggling street of the village 
we draw nearer the present age ; but not much. 
Away towards the east a few monstrosities of 
brick and slate blot the old-time landscape with 
their hideous straight lines and discordant roofs. 
" How nice it would be," exclaimed an admirer, 
" if we had a long row of houses like that ! " 
Ruskin's life-work has borne no harvest in that 
stony soil. But to the west, there, where the 
road bends towards the old church, stand cot- 
tages out of which Anne Hathaway or Master 
William Shakespeare might step at any moment. 
Lovingly the weather-stained thatch has grown 
into harmony with the old walls over which it 
spreads its mantle, and the roses climb up from 
beneath to kiss the ancient roof-tree with their 
blushing petals. "But thatch is so unhealthy, 
you know," suggests a Girtonian hygienist. 

128 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Mollycoddles that we moderns are ! Even if it 
were — what then ? Life is vastly overrated in 
these days ; too much is done for the survival of 
the unfittest. But is it ? Those heroes who laid 
the proud Armada low were bred under roofs of 
thatch. 

What walks there are in this old-world village ! 
There are footpaths everywhere, and none of 




The Lythe 

them lead whither Richard Jeffries' footpaths 
led him — back to a railway station, and so to 
London. The great iron road is so far away that 
not even the engine's shriek carries to this quiet 
dell. There is a meandering valley called " The 
Lythe," — the village has a vocabulary of its 
own, — and there is a choice of two paths towards 

131 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the old priory, whither it leads. The one on the 
left of the valley dips down over a swelling hill, 
passes through such a wicket-gate as Constable 
would have loved, winds leisurely on under the 
shadow of the stately beeches, crosses a meadow 
or two in luscious grass, strikes into a wild 
copse, where the bracken and bramble and dog- 
rose tangle themselves across the footway, and 
emerges in a field where a prostrate stone coffin 
is nearly all that remains of the priory which 
reared its head here five hundred years ago. Yet 
not quite all. In the corner of the farmhouse 
garden is a small arbour, bright still with the 
tiles which sandalled monkish feet pressed in the 
far-off years. What a gulf yawns between our 
time and theirs ! But are we on the right side 
of it? 

By the letter of law, Selborne belongs to Lord 
Selborne, and other landowners ; by the gavel- 
kind of genius it belongs to Gilbert White. 
Born here, nurtured here, pastor here, died here, 
buried here, — such is the record of his simple 
history. The village is permeated with his pres- 
ence still ; his footprints may be traced through 
the length and breadth of the parish. 

It is a feasible theory that Selborne itself is 
responsible for what Gilbert White was and did. 

132 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Environment is a persistent moulder of character. 
" Selborne," says Frank Buckland, " was a big 
bird-cage in which White himself was enclosed 
even more than the birds." To-day it is a pil- 
grimage which only the earnest devotee thinks 




The Plestob 

of making ; there are five full miles between it 
and the nearest railway station. In White's 
time the village was even more effectually cut 
off from the outer world. Then the only ap- 
proach was along those fearsome " hanging lanes," 
which, disused for many a year, still survive in 
a wild jungle condition as samples of the roads 

133 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

our forefathers traversed. Few were the visitors 
coming and going ; the inaccessibility of the par- 
ish was responsible for it becoming a nest of 
smugglers. White was driven to seek compan- 
ionship among the fowls of the air. 

Little change has come over Selborne during 
the hundred-odd years that have passed since 
Gilbert White's death. From the entrance to 
the village on the Alton Road to a hundred 
yards or so east of the house in which he lived, 
the change would hardly be perceptible even to 
his keen eye. The old village-green — " vulgarly 
called the Plestor," says White — is unaltered, 
save that the sycamore-tree in the centre has in- 
creased in girth with advancing years. Gilbert 
White's house, too, has enlarged its borders and 
taken on a slightly modern air, yet it is not so 
refashioned that its former owner would be in 
danger of passing it even on the darkest night ; 
many of those cottages in which the curate- 
naturalist took such excusable pride, remain to 
shame the twentieth-century spirit with their 
picturesque harmonies of half timber and thatch ; 
and the church itself is practically unchanged 
from the aspect it wore on that July day, more 
than a century ago, when the beloved pastor of 
this old-world village was carried through its 

134 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

porch to his resting-place in the peaceful church- 
yard. 

Gilbert White's house and Gilbert White's 
church are naturally the chief foci of interest. 
Most pilgrims will turn to the house first, as 
being more intimately connected with the per- 
sonal life of the man whose memory has brought 




Gilbert White's House from the Rear 



them hither. It stands close to the village high- 
way, and its rare picture of blended red-brick 
and green foliage might have moved the heart of 
Dr. Johnson to fall in love with rural life. But 
its chief beauties are hidden from the eyes of 
the passer-by, and beheld only by those who are 
favoured with permission to pass through the 

137 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

house and inspect it from the grounds in the 
rear. These grounds are kept with fine taste 
and skill, and in much the same contour as in 




Gilbert White's Sun-dial 

White's time. On the farthest verge of the 
lawn still stands the naturalist's sun-dial ; over 
in the meadow is the shivering aspen he planted ; 
and here on the right is a wall he built, with 

138 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

"G. W., 1761," still clearly legible on a small 
tablet embedded among the bricks. Then there 
is his " favourite walk," a long, narrow pathway 
of bricks, leading from the house for several 
hundred feet in the direction of the wooded hill 
known as " The Hanger." For several years the 
house has been in the possession of Mr. Parkin, 
a gentleman who, with rare self-denial, is ever 
willing to open his doors to the reasonable pil- 
grim. And this not without having suffered 
experiences which would have justified him in 
keeping them tightly shut. While the house 
was being put into order for the family's incom- 
ing, a parson had the ill-grace to lead a party of 
twenty-five equally boorish companions on a 
wild romp through the private rooms, and one 
day a cyclist of fine intelligence rang the bell to 
ask, " Would you mind my riding my bicycle 
along Gilbert White's path ? " " Yes, 1 should," 
promptly replied Mr. Parkin ; " and the sooner 
you ride it off the better pleased I shall be." 

One of the principal curiosities of the village 
owes its existence to Gilbert White. Towards 
the eastern end of "The Hanger" there is a 
wide gap in the dense beechen foliage with 
which the hill is clothed, and here a pathway has 
been cut up to the summit in the form of a 
139 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

continuous row of letter v's laid sideways, thus 
< . It is called " The Zigzag," and White 




The Zigzag 

refers to its cutting in his third letter to Mr. 
Thomas Pennant. The path, which had become 
dangerous, was remade by Mr. Parkin, and at 
the same time a careful measurement showed 

140 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

it to be a quarter of a mile in length, equal to 
three times the distance straight up the hill. 
Further east still along the village street may 
be seen a very utilitarian memorial to White. 




Wishing Stone on the Hanger 

On an iron door built into a wall by the road- 
side there may be read this inscription : " This 
water supply was given to Selborne by volun- 
tary subscription in memory of Gilbert White, 

141 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

1894." From inside that iron door comes the 
ceaseless thud of the ram by which the water 
is forced up into the reservoir from which the 
village is supplied. No one can find fault with 




Well-head 

such a practical memorial, but it seems a pity 
the Selborne people did not give its outward and 
visible form a more picturesque embodiment. 

On the way back to the church let a pause be 
made at the vicarage, where the Rev. Arthur 

142 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




Kaye will produce the old parish register in 
which White made so many entries. If it is 
opened in the middle of the year 1793, it will 
reveal the page which has been reproduced by 
the camera. This 
page will serve as 
well as any to illus- 
trate the clear, hon- 
est penmanship of 
the naturalist, and 
it possesses the ad- 
ditional interest of 
bearing the record 
of his own death 
and burial. More- 
over, it corrects a 
blunder common 
with most writ- 
ers about White. 
By the majority 
he is described as 
"Vicar" of Sel- 
borne, but his own off-repeated signature shows 
that he was never more than curate. 

Selborne Church is seen to the most advan- 
tage from a steep pasture to the east of the 
building, called "The Lythe." (The parish, 

143 



1 




UlJU. lis r 



Selborne Parish Register 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

as has been said, has a vocabulary of its own, 
due, in White's opinion, to the persistence of the 
Saxon dialect in the district.) The church is 
beautifully kept, and the visitor may still confide 
in its famous curate's description of it. The 
squat pillars, the " deep and capacious front," the 
Knights Templars' tombs, are all as they were. 
But high up in the corner of the chancel wall is 
a tablet which Gilbert White never saw. This 
tablet has misled many pilgrims, for its first sen- 
tence reads thus : " In the fifth grave from this 
wall are buried the remains of the Revd Gil- 
bert White, M.A." Naturally, then, search is 
made for the grave inside the church. It is so 
easy to overlook the inscription at the top of the 
tablet which records that it was "removed into 
the chancel MDCCCX." Hardly would the 
patient historian of the birds and flowers and 
insects of Selborne have slept peacefully save 
in that open air which is their home. In the 
graveyard, then, close to the northeast corner 
of the church, must the simple headstone be 
sought which marks where lies the dust of Gil- 
bert White. That lichen-stained stone is a 
grievance to some people ; they write to the 
vicar, and urge him to place a " modern memo- 
rial " over the grave. How many there are who 

144. 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

have no sense of the fitness of things ! Happily 
the vicar holds the sane opinion that a " modem 
memorial " would be wholly out of keeping with 
Gilbert White's character and work; that this 




In Selborne Church 



time-worn stone is the most seemly cenotaph for 
a man who lived so near to nature as he. 

There is no official visitors' book at Selborne, 
the only substitute being a somewhat tattered 
volume kept in the Queen's Arms Hotel. As 
the church doors are left constantly open, and as 
all pilgrims include that building in their tour of 
inspection, would it not be a good idea to place 
147 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

such a book on a desk in the porch ? Many 
famous names are inscribed in the volume kept 
at the hotel — those of Professor Huxley, Lord 
Napier and Ettrick, and John Burroughs being 




Knights Templars' Tombs 



of the number. Some visitors have delivered 
themselves of opinions as to what should be 
done to White's resting-place, Mr. Frederic Har- 
rison expressing the hope that on his next visit 
to Selborne he may find " some attention has 
been given to the grave and headstone of Gilbert 
White." Is Mr. Harrison also among the Phil- 
istines who pine for a " modern memorial " ? 

148 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

If ever the spirit of Philistinism should so 
assert itself as to ensure the triumphant erection 
of a tasteless modern memorial to the famous 
naturalist, the hope may be expressed that this 
simple " headstone grey " may still remain to 
mark the grave of White. He, we may be 
sure, would have wished for no more ornate 
memorial. 




Gilbert White's Grave 



149 



VI 

GOLDSMITHS "DESERTED VILLAGE" 



VI 

GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE" 

" Who, of the millions whom he has amused, does not love him ? 
To be the most loved of English writers, what a title that for a 
man! William Makepeace Thackeray. 

There is one village we all know and love. 
The eye of sense may never have rested on its 
grassy lanes, the ear of sense may never have 
heard the subdued murmur of its quiet sounds, 
but its beauties and its harmonies dwell apart in 
the imagination of us all. Familiar, too, as any 
friends of flesh and blood are the actors who play 
their part on this rural stage. 

Chief among them, and kindly father of all, 
stands the village preacher, whose heart's gates 
were flung as wide open as the doors of his 
modest home. We know him in his home, in 
the village street, by the bedside of departing 
life, and in the church, where 

"Truth from his lips prevailed with douhle sway." 

By the glowing light of his fireside we discern 
now the form of an aged beggar, anon the wreck 

153 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of a gay spendthrift and again the besoiled uni- 
form of a broken soldier. As these waifs of hu- 
manity come and go, as they one by one fill that 
hospitable chair and are warmed and fed, the one 
figure which is permanent in the picture is that 
of the godly host, and his face is ever radiant 
with tender sympathy. In this lowly cottage, 
where parting life is laid, it is the same venerable 
figure, the same kindly face, that bends in loving 
sorrow over the humble bed. Along the village 
street, too, we recognise that well-known form, 
and as the children pluck the flowing gown 
the same serene countenance bathes them in its 
smiles. Even when we enter the village church 
on the holy day of rest, we find the same benign 
figure claiming of natural right the high position 
of leader among the simple worshippers within 
its walls. And as these pictures brighten and 
fade in the chamber of memory we repeat softly 
to ourselves : 

" Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride, 
And e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side ; 
But in his duty prompt at every call, 
He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all ; 
And, as a bird each fond endearment tries 
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies, 
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, 
Allured to brighter woi-lds, and led the way." 
154 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Another familiar figure in this dream-world 
of ours is the village schoolmaster. As he takes 
his place in the morning at his rude desk we see 
the anxious faces of his pupils upturned in an 
eager scrutiny ; well skilled are they by rueful 
experience in determining from his first looks 
whether the day is to be one of calm or storm. 
If he cracks a joke, the laughter is out of all 
proportion to the wit ; if he argues in words of 
"learned length and thundering sound" the 
amazed rustics marvel that so small a head 
should hold such a portentous store of knowl- 
edge. From the village school the memory 
passes to the village ale-house, with its 

" White-washed wall, and nicely sanded floor, 
The varnished clock that clicked behind the door." 

Here are the sage statesmen of the rural world, 
who solve with narrow-visioned ignorance prob- 
lems such as burden their more responsible pro- 
totypes with anxious days and sleepless nights. 

But where is this village to be found, and what 
is its name ? 

To attempt to answer that twofold question is 
to tackle a knotty point of literary criticism. 

When Thackeray roamed through the Green 
Isle in search of material for his " Irish Sketch- 
Book," his route led him along a " more dismal 

155 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

and uninteresting road " than he had ever before 
seen. That road brought him " through the ' old, 
inconvenient, ill-built and ugly town of Athlone.' 
The painter would find here, however, some good 
subjects for his sketch-book in spite of the com- 




Athlone 



mination of the Guide-Book. Here, too," Thack- 
eray continues, " great improvements are taking 
place for the Shannon navigation, which will 
render the town not so inconvenient as at present 
it is stated to be ; and hard by lies a little village 
that is known and loved by all the world where 
English is spoken. It is called Lishoy, but its 

156 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

real name is Auburn, and it gave birth to one 
Noll Goldsmith, whom Mr. Boswell was in the 
habit of despising very heartily." 

Thackeray was right to qualify what he calls 
the " commination of the Guide-Book." Athlone, 
the most convenient point for a visit to Gold- 
smith's " Deserted Village," is, on the whole, of 
all the many provincial towns I visited in a tour 
which embraced the greater part of Ireland, 
decidedly the most pleasing and picturesque, — 
the most pleasing, even apart from its associa- 
tions with Goldsmith. Starting from the one 
bridge of the town, which spans the broad Shan- 
non and links the two parts of Athlone together, 
the main street of the place straggles gently up- 
ward, and soon merges into the charming country 
road which stretches out to Auburn. Thus far 
the citizens of the midland town have done little 
to cultivate the gentle art of laying traps for the 
literary pilgrim. " There are two hotels in Ath- 
lone," said an Irishman to me when I was miles 
away from the place, " and whichever one you 
go to, you will wish you had gone to the other." 
That main street in which those two lucky-bag 
hotels are situated, and the old castle, are much 
the same in objective appearance as they were 
during the two years which the boy Oliver Gold- 

157 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

smith spent in Athlone at that " school of repute" 
kept by the Rev. Mr. Campbell. No one knows 
the fate of that school ; its locality in the town 
and its history subsequent to the pupilage of its 
most famous scholar are as shrouded in mystery 
as the place of his burial in the Temple grave- 
yard. Thwarted, then, of the pleasure of paying 
homage at that shrine, it only remains for the 
lover of Goldsmith to diffuse his adoration among 
those aspects of the town upon which the eye of 
his hero must have fallen. There are, of course, 
many houses in the principal street which have 
survived the ravages of a century and a half, in- 
cluding one three-storied building, once occupied 
by some of Goldsmith's family ; but probably the 
hand of time has rested with the most ineffective 
touch upon the sturdy walls of Athlone Castle. 
Some seven centuries have come and gone since 
those walls first saw their own outlines reflected 
in the placid waters of the Shannon, and between 
then and now the castle has played no inconspic- 
uous part in Irish history. 

But Athlone — " the ford of the moon," from 
Ath Luain, a name given because there was a 
ford here used in pagan times by worshippers of 
the moon — is of primary interest just now as 
the starting-point for a visit to that village hard 

158 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

by in which Thackeray makes Goldsmith to be 
born. Of course he was wrong in naming Lishoy 
as Goldsmith's natal place, for that honour be- 
longs to Pallas in county Longford ; but as Lis- 
hoy was the home of his boyhood it possesses 
quite equal interest for the literary pilgrim. 




The Deserted Village 



While Oliver Goldsmith was creating his pic- 
ture of " The Deserted Village," had he any model 
before him ? Lord Macaulay answers emphatic- 
ally in the negative, and affirms that there never 
was any such hamlet as Auburn in Ireland. On 
the other hand Professor Masson replies " yes " 

159 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

and " no " almost in the same breath. " All 
Goldsmith's phantasies," he says first, " are phan- 
tasies of what may be called reminiscence. Less 
than even Smollett, did Goldsmith invent. . . . 
He drew on recollections of his own life, on the 
history of his own family, on the characters of his 
relatives, on whimsical incidents that had hap- 
pened to him in his Irish youth." But Professor 
Masson soon forgets his own statements, and then 
adds that " we are in England and not in Ireland " 
when we read " The Deserted Village." This is 
rather bewildering, but happily Mr. William 
Black dispels the criticisms of Lord Macaulay 
and Professor Masson by the penetrating remark 
that they overlook one of the radical facts of 
human nature, that is, the magnifying delight of 
the mind in what is long remembered and remote. 
" What was it," Mr. Black asks, " that the imagi- 
nation of Goldsmith, in his life-long banishment, 
could not see when he looked back to the home 
of his childhood, and his early friends, and the 
sports and occupations of his youth ? Lishoy was 
no doubt a poor enough Irish village ; and per- 
haps the farms were not too well cultivated ; and 
perhaps the village preacher, who was so dear to 
all the country round, had to administer many a 
thrashing to a certain graceless son of his ; and 
160 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

perhaps Paddy Byrne was something of a pedant ; 
and no doubt pigs ran over the ' nicely sanded 
floor ' of the inn ; and no doubt the village states- 
men occasionally indulged in a free fight. But 
do you think that was the Lishoy that Goldsmith 
thought of in his dreary lodgings in Fleet Street 
courts ? No. It was the Lishoy where the 
vagrant lad had first seen the ' primrose peep 
beneath the thorn ; ' where he had listened to the 
mysterious call of the bittern by the unfrequented 
river ; it was a Lishoy still ringing with the glad 
laughter of young people in the twilight hours ; 
it was a Lishoy forever beautiful, and tender, 
and far away. The grown-up Goldsmith had 
not to go to any Kentish village for a model ; the 
familiar scenes of his youth, regarded with all 
the wistfulness and longing of an exile, became 
glorified enough." 

If the cogent reasoning set forth above does not 
convince the pilgrim of the authenticity of Lishoy 
as a shrine worthy of his devotions, let him turn 
to " The Deserted Village " for final confirmation. 
Let him ponder, for example, those pathetic lines 
which read as though written in tears and heart's 
blood — 

" In all my wanderings round this world of care, 

In all my griefs — and God has given my share — 
11 161 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

I still had hopes, my latest hours to crown, 
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down ; 
To husband out life's taper at the close, 
And keep the flame from wasting by repose : 
I still had hopes, for pride attends us still, 
Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill, 
Around my fire an evening group to draw, 
And tell of all I felt, and all I saw ; 
And, as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue, 
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew, 
I still had hopes, my long vexations past, 
Here to return — and die at home at last." 

Lishoy, or " Auburn," as it is much oftener 
called, is about seven miles from Athlone. The 
drive thither, on a mellow end-of-the-summer 
day, lingers in my memory as a quietly moving 
panorama of subdued pastoral pictures. Athlone 
is no sooner lost behind bosky trees and gently 
swelling hills than, to the left, away down there 
at the edge of emerald fields, Killinure Lough 
holds up its mirror to catch the mingling glories 
of a cerulean sky shot with fleecy clouds. Slowly 
this picture fades away and gives place to an- 
other of the village of Glassen, than which I 
was to see no more picturesque hamlet in all 
my travels through Ireland. Approached at 
either end through an avenue of spreading trees, 
the one street of the village is lined with neat 
little cottages, now roofed with thatch, and anon 
162 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

with warm red tiles. Although abutting sharp 
upon the road, each house has its climbing rose 
or trailing vine, and it was the exception rather 
than the rule to note a window-sill without its 
box of flowers. A mile or so further, and the 




Glasses Vi 



road dips down between rows of pines and 
beeches, the pronounced lines of the one accen- 
tuating the flowing outlines of the other. And 
so the jaunting-car bowls merrily on, pausing at 
last before the ruins of the Goldsmith house. 
Now the pilgrim seems to tread familiar ground. 
The journey has taken him through scenes which 

163 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

recall no associations, but at the sight of these 
falling walls, unseen before, the lips murmur 
almost unconsciously : 

" Near yonder copse, where once the garden smiled, 
And still where many a garden flower grows wild, 
There, where a few torn shrubs the place disclose, 
The village preacher's modest mansion rose." 

And no sooner does the mind assent to the 
accuracy of Goldsmith's description of the out- 
ward setting of the house than memory offers 
her aid to the imagination in an effort to call 
up again some of the scenes which passed within 
its walls : 

" His house was known to all the vagrant train — 
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain ; 
The long-remembered beggar was his guest, 
Whose beard, descending, swept his aged breast ; 
The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, 
Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed ; 
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, 
Sat by his fire, and talked the night away, 
Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done, 
Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won. 
Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow, 
And quite forgot their vices in their woe ; 
Careless their merits or their faults to scan, 
His pity gave ere charity began." 

This house must have been a spacious one for 
a Protestant village parson in Ireland. It stands 

164 



I 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

back some two hundred yards from the road, and 
is approached by a broad avenue of springy grass, 
bordered with fine old trees. Five windows and 
two stories give hints of ample accommodation, 
and the walls are so stoutly made that the build- 




The " Glassy Brook 



ing, considering its history, might well be restored 
to a habitable condition again. 

Leaving the Goldsmith house on the left, a 
walk of a few hundred paces along the road that 
turns sharply round past its end brings the pil- 
grim to an admirable standpoint from which to 
gain an adequate impression of " Sweet Auburn " 
167 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

as a whole. Irregularly hedged pastures rise and 
fall in gentle undulations, and the road has that 
welcome grass-fringe so common in England and 
Ireland but so rare in Scotland. Here and there 




The " Busy Mill '' 



the outline of the hedges is broken by tapering 
or spreading trees, and through those trees peep 
glimpses of the " sheltered cot, the cultivated 
farm." No wonder that the memory of this 
peaceful spot soothed the unstrung spirit of the 
London-pent Goldsmith ; no wonder he brooded 
with such delicious painful sorrow over those 
visions of the happy past which thronged his 
168 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

brain ; no wonder he poured out his heart in 
that pathetic apostrophe: 

" O blest retirement, friend to life's decline, 
Retreat from care that never must be mine, 
How blest is he who crowns, in shades like these, 
A youth of labour with an age of ease ; 
Who quits the world, where strong temptations try, 
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly ! " 



The "Decent Chtrch" 

Of the many sights of Auburn that were 
familiar to Goldsmith's eyes, only a few remain. 
The "busy mill" is still there, but idle now for 
many a year, and roofless and overgrown with 
tangled weeds. Close by, too, is the " glassy 
brook," more true to its name than would be 
169 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



imagined from the poem, so perfect is its reflec- 
tion of hedge and sky. A mile or so away a 
"decent church" tops the hill, occupying the 
same site and doubtless perpetuating the outward 

image of the building 
in which the boy Oliver 
often listened to the 
| sermons of the Vicar 
of Wakefield. Not far 
' distant, on the summit 
of a modest hill that 
rises from the road- 
side, stands a rudely 
built circular stone pil- 
lar, which is said to 
mark the exact cen- 
tre of Ireland. The 
wayfarer in these 
parts cannot resist the 
thought that in the 
near future, when Ire- 
land gets its share of those who travel in search 
alike of the beautiful and the shrines of the 
great, this Goldsmith country will become in- 
deed the centre of the Green Isle. 

Such, then, are some of the objective forms 
which conduct the visitor to Lishoy into the 
170 




The Centre of Ireland 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

realm of imagination, and their task is made all 
the easier by those innumerable other subjective 
shapes which people these lanes and fields with 
the children of a far-off generation. And yet 
they are not far-off" from us ; their joys and sor- 
rows are akin to our own ; their living human 
nature makes them of that family which has 
no yesterday nor morrow. 




Goldsmith's Grave in the Temple, London 



171 



VII 
BURNS IN AYRSHIRE 



VII 

BURNS IN AYRSHIRE 

" The lark of Scotia's morning sky ! 

Whose voice may sing his praises ? 
JVitJi Heaven's own sunlight in his eye, 

He walked among the daisies, 
Till through the cloud of fortune's wrong 

He soared to fields of glory ; 
But left his land her sweetest song 

And earth her saddest story." 

Oliver Wendell Holmes. 

Burns lived for thirty-seven years, and he spent 
twenty-seven of them in Ayrshire. A line 
drawn on the map of that county from Irvine 
in the north to Kirkoswald in the south, de- 
flected through Kilmarnock, Mauchline, and 
Dalrymple, embraces his homes and haunts prior 
to the triumphal appearance in Edinburgh. 
But Irvine, Kilmarnock, and Kirkoswald only 
retained the poet for a brief season ; the first 
was the scene of his disastrous attempt to learn 
flax-dressing, the second only claimed him while 
he was seeing his poems through the press, and 
the third witnessed his brief apprenticeship to 
175 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the art of mensuration. Hence a more restricted 
line will include all of Ayrshire associated with 
the greater portion of Burns's life. It must start 
from Alloway, run out to Mount Oliphant, turn 
back and pass through Tarbolton, touch at Moss- 
giel, and end in Mauchline. A small theatre for 
great deeds. 

Scotland's two greatest peasant writers — 
Burns and Carlyle — were both born in houses 
of their fathers' own building. In the case of 
Carlyle's father, inasmuch as he was a mason, 
this is not particularly remarkable ; but the fact 
that Burns's father reared with his own hands 
the now famous cottage at Alloway is significant 
of much in the character of the man. From 
the days of his early manhood, when poverty 
drove him from home on his long search after 
the bare necessaries of life, to the closing scene 
at Lochlea, William Burns was engaged in a 
never-ceasing struggle to wrest from the earth 
a fitting sustenance for himself and family, and 
the only remaining monument of any conquest 
he made is to be seen in " auld clay biggin " 
where his immortal son was born. 

Alloway was once a separate parish, but 
towards the end of the seventeenth century it 
was united with that of Ayr, from the town 
176 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of which it is some two miles distant. The ap- 
proach from Ayr to Alloway is characteristic- 
ally twentieth century. Small semi-detached 
villas line the road on either side, and these fade 
away only to give place to the larger and more 
pretentious mansions of county magnates, with a 
race-course for a background. The Burns cot- 
tage itself has rather too much the air of a 
commercial show-place, with its conventional 
turnstile and persistent charge of twopence for 
admission. There are relics in plenty scattered 
around, from the bed in which the poet was 
born, to the spinning-wheel of his mother ; but 
somehow the air seems stifling to the literary 
pilgrim, and he is glad to escape from the white 
glare of mediocre sculpture and the sheen of 
coffee urns — all duly displayed in the temperance 
refreshment-room attached to the cottage — to 
the freer atmosphere outside. 

A few hundred yards down the road, in the 
direction of the " banks and braes o' bonnie 
Doon," the gaunt gables of " Alloway 's auld 
haunted kirk " rear themselves high in the air. 
At once the apposite remark of Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne flashes across the mind : " Kirk Alloway 
is inconceivably small, considering how large a 
space it fills in our imagination before we see 
12 177 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

It." Its place in literature, as the scene of the 
midnight orgies witnessed by Tarn O' Shanter, 
was secured by a mere accident. In the fall of 
the year 1790, one Captain Grose happened to 
be travelling through Scotland intent on anti- 



■ mfr 




Alloway' 



Ai'ld Haunted Kiuk 



quarian study. His path crossed that of Burns, 
who was then trying his last farming experiment 
at Ellisland, and the two soon became " unco 
pack and thick thegither." The poet one day 
pressed the claims of Alloway Kirk on the anti- 
quarian's notice and Captain Grose agreed to 
make a drawing of the building on condition that 
178 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the poet furnished an appropriate witch-story as 
comment. A bargain was struck, and the result 
was Tarn O' Shanter. 

From his childhood to his eighteenth year, 
Burns had been familiar with the old ruin, and 
his mind was stored with gruesome evil-spirit 
tragedies of which it had been the theatre. It 
was easy to draw upon these memories for his 
share of the bargain with Captain Grose, and not 
less easy, apparently, to immortalise the exploits 
of Tarn O' Shanter, for the poem is said to have 
been written in a day. And now Kirk Alloway 
is only interesting for Tarn O' Shanter's sake. 
All its associations with the joys and sorrows of 
past generations, its witnessings of baptism, mar- 
riage, and funeral, its memories of contrition and 
aspiration under the spell of Christian exhorta- 
tion and promise, have faded away, and the ear 
of imagination loses the echoes of holy psalm in 
the skirl of that untoward music which fell upon 
the astonished ears of Tam O' Shanter. 

That " winnock-bunker in the east," where sat 
the beast-shaped musician of that unholy revel, 
the opened coffins whence were thrust the pallid 
hands that held aloft the blazing torches, the 
" span-lang " bairns who gazed with wide-eyed 
amazement on the swiftly moving dance, the win- 
179 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

dow which framed the absorbed face of Tarn 
O' Shanter — these are the sights the eye seeks in 
Alloway Kirk. Outside its walls, and among the 
crowded graves which jostle each other with 
unseemly obstinacy in this scant God's acre, the 
eye wanders in quest of William Burns's tomb. 




GltAVE OF BlTRNs's FATHER 



Unquestionably the father of Robert Burns 
had a double right to a resting-place in the 
shadow of Kirk Alloway ; the right of the man 
whose son lifted it into the realm of poesy, and 
the right of the man who, years before, rebuilt 
the ruined walls of its graveyard. It was natu- 

180 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

ral, then, that William Burns should wish to be 
buried in Alloway Churchyard, and when he at 
last laid down the burden of life at Lochlea in 
1784, his widow and children did not hesitate as 
to where his dust should rest. The small head- 
stone which was at first reared over the grave has 
given place to the more substantial memorial of 
the present day, on the back of which the son's 
affectionate tribute is inscribed : 

" O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains, 
Draw near with pious rev'rence and attend ! 
Here lie the loving husband's dear remains, 
The tender father, and the gen'rous friend ; 
The pitying heart that felt for human woe, 
The dauntless heart that fear'd no human pride ; 
The friend of man — to vice alone a foe ; 
For 'e'en his failings lean'd to virtue's side.' " 

It was a lucky chance for Tarn O' Shanter that 
the river Doon and its " auld brig " were within 
easy hail of Alloway Kirk. That irrepressible 
" Weel done, Cutty-sark ! " started the whole 
pack of midnight revellers at his horse's heels : 

" Now do thy speedy utmost, Meg, 
And win the Keystane o' the brig : 
There at them thou thy tail may toss, 
A running stream they dare na cross." 

The Doon has a new bridge now to bear the 
burden of twentieth-century traffic, but the "auld 

181 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

brig " still spans the lovely river, an indubitable 
link between our own time and the stormy- 
night of Tarn O' Shanter's ride. Other memories 
than those of Tarn O' Shanter crowd into the 
mind while musing by the side of the clear- 
running Doon. Here are the shows of nature 




The Brig o' Doon 

which were frail and vain to weep a loss that 
turned their lights to shade. Sacred through all 
time are these banks and braes to the memory 
of that disconsolate wanderer who reproached the 
birds for singing and the flowers for blooming, 
but had no harsh thought for that " fause lover" 
who had thrown her out of harmony with nature. 

182 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

In Burns's seventh year the scene of his life 
shifted from Alloway to Mount Oliphant, a small 
seventy-acre farm some two miles distant. This 
was to be his home for more than ten years. The 
outward setting of Mount Oliphant is probably 
little different from what it was in the poet's 
day, though the farm buildings have necessarily 
been considerably remodelled and enlarged. 
The new era which opened for Burns with his 
removal thither was of far-reaching importance ; 
he confessed to Dr. Moore that it was during 
the time he lived on that farm that his story 
was most eventful. There, indeed, now from 
the worthy Murdoch, now from the lips of 
his remarkable father, and anon at the par- 
ish school of Dalrymple, he acquired most of 
the knowledge which teachers can impart, and 
there, too, he experienced " the cheerless gloom 
of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley- 
slave." 

One incident of the Mount Oliphant days re- 
vealed the deep tenderness of the poet's heart. 
It happened that Murdoch, the old teacher of 
Robert and Gilbert, visited the farm one night 
to take farewell of his friends ere leaving for 
another part of the country, and brought with 
him a copy of " Titus Andronicus " as a parting 

183 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

present to his pupils. When the day's work was 
done, and the family gathered together, Murdoch 
began to read the play aloud. He had got to 
the fifth scene of the second act, where Lavinia 
appears with her hands cut off and her tongue 




Mount Oliphavt 

cut out, but when he reached the taunting words 
of Chiron, " Go home, call for sweet water, wash 
thy hands," the entire family besought him, with 
tears, to cease reading. The father remarked that 
if they would not hear the end of the tragedy it 
would be useless to leave the book, whereupon 
Robert at once struck in with the threat that 
if it were left he would burn it ! 

184 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

It was not without good cause that the poet 
complained of the hermit-like existence that fell 
to his lot on this farm. Gilbert says : " Nothing 
could be more retired than our general manner 
of living at Mount Oliphant ; we rarely saw 
anybody but the members of our own family. 
There were no boys of our own age or near 
it in the neighbourhood/' This was not alto- 
gether a disadvantage. Burns was thus driven 
in upon himself, and to the study of such books 
as the family possessed or could borrow. But 
it was a hard life he lived at Mount Oliphant. 
He had to labour in the fields to an extent far 
beyond his strength, and to subsist on food of 
the poorest description. This continued to his 
fifteenth autumn, and then he awoke to love 
and poetry, — henceforth the dual consolation 
of his life. 

It was harvest-time. In his work amid the 
golden grain it was the fortune of Burns to 
have for partner a " bewitching creature " a year 
younger than himself ; " a bonnie, sweet, sonsie 
lass." The hour had come which was to awaken 
the singing soul of Burns, and unseal that fount 
of lyric love in which all after-time was to re- 
joice. The story is best given in his own words : 
" In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, 

185 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

initiated me in that delicious passion which, in 
spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, 
and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first 
of human joys, our dearest blessing here below. 
How she caught the contagion I cannot tell ; 
you medical people talk much of infection from 
breathing the same air, the same touch, etc. ; 
but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed 
I did not know myself why I liked so much to 
loiter behind with her, when returning in the 
evening from our labour ; why the tones of her 
voice made my heart-strings thrill like aniEolian 
harp ; and particularly why my pulse beat such 
a furious ' rat-tan,' when I looked and fingered 
over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle- 
stings and thistles. Among her other love- 
inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly ; and it was 
her favourite reel to which 1 attempted giving 
an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so 
presumptuous as to imagine that I could make 
verses like the printed ones, composed by men 
who had Greek and Latin, but my girl sang a 
song which was said to be composed by a small 
country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, 
with whom he was in love, and I saw no reason 
why I might not rhyme as well as he ; for ex- 
cepting that he could smear sheep and cut peats, 

186 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

his father living in the moorlands, he had no more 
scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began 
love and poetry ." 

Still, Mount Oliphant cannot have been a 
happy home for the Burns family. The poor 




Lochlea Farm 



and hungry soil of the farm entailed constant 
labour on every member of the family able to 
do a hand's turn, and with all their efforts, no 
adequate recompense was forthcoming. Hence 
it must have been with a sigh of relief that 
they turned their back upon the scene of such 
hardships to make a new trial of life on the 
farm at Lochlea. This new home of Burns — 

187 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

where the next seven years of his life were 
spent — was situated in the upper part of the 
parish of Tarbolton. It lies in a hollow, and 
took its name from a small loch, now no longer 
in existence. Take it for all in all, Lochlea 
was perhaps the happiest home the poet ever 
had. Life never moved more smoothly for 
him than during the first few years in Tarbol- 
ton parish, and as yet his ungovernable pas- 
sions had not brought him into contact with 
kirk-sessions and the severer reprimands of his 
own conscience. 

Gilbert Burns used to speak of this period as 
the brightest in his brother's life, and was wont 
to recall with delight the happy days they spent 
together in farm work, when Robert was sure to 
enliven the tedium of labour with his unrivalled 
conversation. It was at Lochlea that the inci- 
dent occurred which prompted " The Death and 
Dying Words of Poor Mailie," and in a low-lying 
field near the house the spot where that famous 
ewe nearly committed suicide is still pointed 
out. Other first fruits of poesy were gathered 
during these peaceful days, and many of the 
seeds planted which were to yield such a pro- 
lific harvest at Mossgiel. 

Tarbolton village, some two miles distant from 

188 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Lochlea, naturally figures largely in this period 
of Burns's life. Its chief street still retains some 
continuity with the past. Sandwiched in here 
and there between houses of recent date may be 
seen many of the rough-cast, thatch -covered cot- 
tages common in the poet's time. Among mod- 
ern buildings, the most conspicuous are a public 




library and a masonic hall. The latter, which 
contains some valuable Burns relics, has not been 
erected many years, but is already permeated 
with dry rot and is in a filthy condition. The 
library contains about two thousand volumes, 
and the only Burns literature visible is an odd 
189 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

volume of a three- volumed edition of the poems ! 
It is not surprising, then, to hear the Tarbolton 
people frankly confess that they " take no in- 
terest in Burns." 

There are various links connecting Burns with 
Tarbolton, one being recalled by that sentence in 
his autobiography which runs : " At the plough, 
scythe, or reap-hook, I feared no competitor, and 
set want at defiance ; and as I never cared further 
for any labours than while I was in actual exer- 
cise, / spent the evening in the way after my own 
heart." The beginning of this appears to have 
been attendance at a dancing-school in Tarbol- 
ton. Such institutions are still the common in- 
troductions to courtship in rural Scotland, and 
in the case of Burns there can be no doubt that 
his dancing-school experiences led to those innu- 
merable love episodes which now began to bulk 
so largely in his history. 

Gilbert Burns, writing of this period, says his 
brother " was constantly the victim of some fair 
enslaver," and David Sillar, a boon companion 
of the poet, remarks that he was frequently 
struck with Burns's facility in addressing the fair 
sex. The Lochlea loves have left their impress 
on his poems. The mansion house of Coilsfield 
— transformed by the poet to, and known as, 
190 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Montgomery Castle — is in the vicinity of Tar- 
bolton, and two of its servants were fated to 
find immortality through the young farmer of 
Lochlea. The first was the heroine of " Mont- 
gomerie's Peggy." She was housekeeper at Coils- 
field, and Burns says of her that she was his 
deity for six or eight months. He adds : " She 
had been bred in a style of life rather elegant, 
but (as Vanbrugh says in one of his plays) my 
' damned star found me out ' there too ; for al- 
though I began the affair merely in a gaiete de 
cceur, it will scarcely be believed that a vanity of 
showing my parts in courtship, particularly my 
abilities at a billet-doux (which I always piqued 
myself upon), made me lay siege to her. When 
— as I always do in my foolish gallantries — I 
had battered myself into a very warm affection 
for her, she one day told me, in a flag of truce, 
that her fortress had been for some time before 
the rightful property of another. I found out 
afterwards, that what she told me of a pre- 
engagement was really true ; but it cost me some 
heartaches to get rid of the affair." 

There is a tradition that " Highland Mary" — 
that is, Mary Campbell — was at one time dairy- 
maid at Coilsfield, and it is not improbable that 
Burns first made her acquaintance there. At 
191 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

any rate, the lovely rivulet Fail, which runs 
through the grounds of Montgomery Castle, 
mingles with the nature-background of his most 
famous song to Mary's memory : 

" Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery ! 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never drumlie : 
There Summer first unfald her robes, 

And there the langest tarry! 
For there I took the last Farewell 

O' my sweet Highland Mary ! " 




But there was 
another side to 
Burns's evenings 
from home. So- 
ciable by nature, 
he availed himself 
of every opportu- 
nity of convivial 
intercourse with 
young men of his 
own age and sta- 
tion. Hence the 
creation of that 
Bachelors Club, 
where the topics 



1.92 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




for discussion seem to have been selected on the 
principle of consoling its members for their tem- 
porary absence from the fair sex. Hence, too, 
Burns's action in becoming a Freemason. His 
initiation took place on July 4, 1781, and the old 
thatched cottage 
in which the cere- 
mony took place 
still stands at the 
corner of Mauch- 
line Road. It 
was at a meeting 
of the lodge that 
the idea of "Death 
and Dr. Horn- 
book" took shape. John Wilson, the Tarbolton 
schoolmaster, who eked out his scholastic earn- 
ings by amateur physicking, one evening paraded 
his medical knowledge in such an ostentatious 
manner that Burns resolved, on his way home, 
to hold the dominie-medico up to ridicule. 
With what result the world knows. The scene 
of the dialogue between Burns and Death is 
laid just outside Tarbolton. Leaving the old 
Masonic Lodge on the right, the road winds 
" round about " a high mound, and then descends 
toward Willie's Mill. In the bank by the road- 

13 193 



nc Lodge, Tarboltc 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

side, under the shadow of a hedge, local tradi- 
tion points to a few rough, projecting stones as 
the seat where the poet and his gaunt friend 
"eased their shanks" while discussing the skill 
of Dr. Hornbook. 




Willie's Mill 

When William Burns died in 1784, the last 
link was snapped which held his family at Loch- 
lea. Prior to that event, however, Robert and 
Gilbert had taken the farm of Mossgiel, " as an 
asylum for the family in case of the worst." 
With the removal to Mossgiel, the poet took a 
resolve to mend his ways and address himself 
seriously to the work of life. 



I read farming 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

books," he said, " I calculated crops, I attended 
markets, and, in short, in spite of the devil, and 
the world, and the flesh, I believe I should have 
been a wise man ; but the first year, from unfor- 
tunately buying bad seed, the second, from a late 
harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all 
my wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his 
vomit, and the sow that was washed to her 
wallowing in the mire/' 

It is impossible to doubt that Burns really de- 
sired to settle down for himself. Already he 
had made several efforts in that direction, each 
of which had been remorselessly thwarted. He 
groped about for the clue which should enable 
him to unravel his life in an orderly fashion ; but 
it was his misfortune always to lay hold of a 
loop in the skein, and by violent tugging at that 
to reduce the whole to a hopeless tangle. " The 
great misfortune of my life," he confesses, " was 
to want an aim." At first, Mossgiel promised to 
provide that aim. His father was dead ; on him 
and his brother Gilbert had devolved the care of 
the widowed mother and her other fatherless 
children. But the trinity of evil proved too 
strong for the poet. The world, in the shape of 
convivial companions ; the devil, in the form 
of bad seed and late harvests ; the flesh, in the 

195 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

enchantments of love, — these met Burns's reso- 
lution in a stern stand-up fight, and speedily 
won a complete victory. Hence it came to pass 
that the Mossgiel period was of crucial importance 
in the life of Burns ; it made his weakness as 
a man and his powers as a poet patent to the 
world. 

Mossgiel farm is situated in the parish of 
Mauchline, from the town of which name it is 
about a mile distant. Whatever it may have 
been in the poet's time, it strikes the visitor in 
these days as a most desirable home. Although 
written more than seventy years ago, Words- 
worth's sonnet is still accurate in its chief 
outlines : 

" ' There ! ' said a Stripling, pointing with meet pride 
Towards a low roof with green trees half concealed, 
' Is Mossgiel Farm ; and that 's the very field 
Where Burns ploughed up the Daisy.' Far and wide 
A plain below stretched seaward, while, descried 
Above sea-clouds, the Peaks of Arran rose : 
And, by that simple notice, the repose 
Of earth, sky, sea, and air, was vivified. 
Beneath ' the random biehl of clod or stone ' 
Myriads of daisies have shone foi-th in flower 
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour 
Have passed away ; less happy than the One 
That, by the unwilling ploughshare, died to prove 
The tender charm of poetry and love." 
196 




Mossgiel Farm 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

The house stands on a high ridge, some sixty 
yards back from the road, and is screened with 
the stalwart thorn hedge which the poet and his 
brother are said to have planted. Its walls have 
been considerably raised since it was Burns's 
home, and the roof of thatch has given place to 




The Field of the Daisy 

one of slates. When Hawthorne visited it in 
1857, and forced his way inside in the absence 
of the family, he found it remarkable for nothing 
so much as its dirt and dunghill odour. There 
is neither dirt nor odour to-day. The goodwife 
of the present occupant of Mossgiel, Mr. Wyllie, 
keeps her house spotlessly clean, notwithstanding 
199 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the demands made upon her time by innumer- 
able inquisitive visitors. On the . parlour table 
lies a copious visitors' book, and in the same 
room hang the manuscript of " The Lass o' Bal- 
lochmyle," and the letter in which Burns asked 
Miss Alexander's permission to publish the song. 
At the back of the house lies the field where 
Burns turned down the daisy, and the soil 
" seems to have been consecrated to daisies by 
the song which he bestowed on that first immor- 
tal one." Over the hedge, there is the other 
field where the poet's ploughshare tore up the 
mouse's nest. 

The neighbouring town of Mauchline is a cen- 
tral spot in the history of Burns. In its dancing- 
hall he first met Jean Armour, the inspirer of 
many of his deathless songs, and the destined 
wifely companion of his fortunes ; under the roof 
of Poosie Nansie's hostel he saw the tattered 
vagrants whom his imagination transferred to 
the pages of literature in " The Jolly Beggars ; " 
outside the old church he often witnessed those 
unseemly incidents so unsparingly satirised in 
" The Holy Fair ; " Mauchline Castle was the 
home of his warm-hearted friend, Gavin Ham- 
ilton, and the scene of several interesting events 
in his own life ; and in the churchyard sleep 

200 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




The Cowgate, Mauchline 



many whom he marked as targets for invective 
or subjects for eulogy. Perhaps because it is 
not quite such a rural outpost, Mauchline has 



201 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

changed more than Tarbolton. Still, there are 
many buildings which take the mind back to 
the poet's time, and in the main the topography 
of the place is practically unchanged. The Cow- 
gate illustrates both facts. Here there are sev- 
eral houses which have changed but little during 




Poosie Nansie's, Mauchline 

the past hundred years, and the position of the 
street, with the church at the end, provides an 
illuminating comment on that verse of " The 
Holy Fair" which records how 

". . . Peebles, frae the water-fit 
Ascends the holy rostrum : 
See, up he 's got the word o' God, 
202 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

An' meek an' mim has view'd it, 
While Common-sense has ta'en the road, 
An' aff, an' up the Cowgate 
Fast, fast that day." 

At the corner of the Cowgate stands Poosie 
Nansie's hostel, bearing upon its gable-end the 




Nanse Tinnock's 

legend that it is " The Jolly Beggars' Howf." 
In the time of Burns this cottage was a lodging- 
house for vagrants, and it seems that the poet 
and some of his companions were wont to drop 
in occasionally late at night to see the maimed 
and blind in their undress of sound limbs and 
opened eyes. 

203 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" Ae night at e'en a merry core 
O' randie, gangrel bodies, 
In Poosie Nansie's held the splore, 
To drink their orra duddies. 
Wi' quaffing an' laughing 

They ranted an' they sang ; 
Wi' jumping an' thumping, 
The vera girdle rang." 

Another resort of Burns in these Mauchline 
days has honourable mention in one of his early 
poems. Towards the close of "The Author's 
Earnest Cry and Prayer,'' he exclaims : 

" Tell yon guid bluid o' auld Bonconnock's, 
I '11 be his debt twa mashlum bonnocks, 
An' drink his health in auld Nanse Tinnoek's 

Nine times a week, 
If he some scheme, like tea and winnocks, 

Wad kindly seek." 

In a footnote to the name of Nanse Tinnock 
the poet explained that she was " a worthy old 
hostess of the author's in Mauchline, where he 
sometimes studied politics over a glass of guid, 
auld Scotch drink." Nanse Tinnoek's house may 
still be seen down a narrow lane leading towards 
the churchyard, and opposite is the cottage where 
Burns is said to have " taken up house " with 
Jean Armour. 

From the windows of this cottage a good view 
is obtained of Mauchline Castle, in the business 

204 



\m 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

room of which Burns is reputed to have been 
married. The castle has undergone little or no 
change these hun- 
dred years, and it 

is easy to recall f t 

that Sabbath :':^«ii«x 

morning when the 
worthy Gavin 
Hamilton, peti- 
tioned by his chil- 
dren for some new 

Mauchline Castle 

potatoes tor din- 
ner, instructed his gardener to dig a few, little 
thinking that the eyes of the "unco guid " were 
upon him and that the Mauchline kirk-session 
would bring him to book for such sacrilegious 
fatherly indulgence. 

Facing the head of the main street the vis- 
itor observes a building-block divided into several 
houses, and his interest in it is quickened when 
he learns that the house at the near corner was 
the home of the Morrisons. From this house to 
the churchyard is but a few steps, and one of the 
first tombstones to arrest his attention reads 
thus : " In memory of Adj. John Morrison, of 
the 104th Regiment, who died at Mauchline, 
16th April, 1804, in the 80th year of his age; 

205 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

also his daughter Mary — the Poet's Bonnie 
Mary Morrison — who died 29th June, 1791, 
aged 20." Other tombstones bear names or 
are linked with memories of men and women 
just as familiar. In a far-off corner, with a 
whitewashed wall for background, stands the 
memorial of the Rev. William Auld, better 
known to fame as the " Daddie Auld " of " The 
Kirk's Alarm." By its side lie the ashes of 
Johnnie Richmond, that Mauchline friend of 

Burns who was his 
first host in Edin- 
burgh. A time- 
worn slab marks 
the grave of Wil- 
liam Fisher, that 
village Pharisee 
whose after life and 
death justified the 
" Prayer " Burns 
put in his mouth. The inscription has faded 
away, but every reader of Burns can supply the 
epitaph : 

" Here Holy Willie's sair worn clay 
Taks up its last abode ; 
His saul has ta'en some other way, — 
I fear, the left-hand road." 




Mary Morrison's Home 



206 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Not far from Holy Willie's grave is the lair of 
Gavin Hamilton, enclosed with a simple iron 
railing-, but devoid of any memorial stone. Such 
was the wish of that worthy lawyer, and hence 
his epitaph must be sought in the pages of 
Burns. 

" The poor man weeps — here Gavin sleeps, 
Whom canting wretches blam'd ; 
But with such as he, where'er he be, 
May I be sav'd or damn'd ! " 

Adjoining the end of the church is the burial- 
place of the Alexanders of Ballochmyle, the top 
marble tablet on the left hand commemorating 
the laird of the poet's time. One other grave 
of interest is that of the Armours, from whose 
family Burns chose his wife, and under the 
prostrate stone within these railings the infant 
daughters of the poet are buried. 

One of the favourite walks of Burns was 
among the braes of Ballochmyle, some two 
miles distant, and no poet could have made a 
better choice in the Mauchline country-side. 
Close by, the river Ayr runs its turbulent 
course, and between the two he had copious 
material for poetic thought. But, somehow, it 
is humanity rather than nature which asserts 
its supremacy while wandering among the Ayr- 

207 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



shire homes and haunts of Burns. It is fit it 
should be so, for a large part of the world's 
debt to Burns consists in the fact that he made 
common life classical. To coin quotable coup- 
lets out of the ordinary incidents of lowliest 
lives was his prerogative. The world sadly- 
needed teaching to make an ideal out of its 
actual, and that lesson he taught. The annals 

of the poorest 
peasant's life are 
now as immortal 
as the exploits of 
Hector or the vic- 
tories of Achilles. 
Little things have 
become great 
things since Burns 
sang of them. 
The mouse is a demigod now ; the daisy a flower 
of Paradise. The oft-returning Saturday night 
of the cottar is no longer the common thing it 
was ; it is a sacrament of life. 

Fresh links of sympathy and love between 
man and beast have been forged by the pen of 
Burns, and even the food on our tables — the 
" halesome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food," and 
haggis, " great chieftain o' the pudding-race," — 

208 




The Banks of Ayr 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

is as the ambrosia of the immortals. Burns 
achieved the apotheosis of common life, and 
the height of that achievement can nowhere 
be better measured than among his Ayrshire 
homes. 



20Q 



VIII 
KEATS AND HIS CIRCLE 



VIII 

KEATS AND HIS CIRCLE 

" No one else in English poetry, save Shakespeare, has in 
expression quite the fascinating felicity of Keats, his perfection 
of loveliness. 'I think,' he said humbly, e I shall be among the 
English poets after my death.' He is ; he is with Shakespeare." 

Matthew Arnold. 

" O the flummery of a birthplace ! " was the 
ejaculation in which Keats indulged apropos of 
the disappointment he felt in visiting the cot- 
tage in which Burns was born. No pilgrim to 
his own natal shrine is likely to repeat the phrase, 
for of the birthplace of John Keats no stone is 
left upon another. 

Perhaps it is well that it should be so. Than 
the sombre neighbourhood of Finsbury Pave- 
ment, London, it would be difficult to imagine a 
birthplace more incongruous with the life-story 
of a poet so wedded to romantic beauty as Keats. 
Not that there is much in common with the dis- 
trict as it is to-day and as it was when the poet 
was born on the 31st October, 1795 ; but how- 
ever pleasant the neighbourhood might have been 

213 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

a century or more ago, it would be its aspect 
to-day which would oppress the pilgrim. There 
need be no regrets, then, that the Swan-and- 
Hoop livery-stable has been swept away, nor 
that the house in Craven Street, City Road, to 
which the Keats family removed a few years 
after Johns birth, has also vanished. 

Notwithstanding much assiduous research, 
little is known concerning Thomas Keats, the 
father of the poet. He came from the west of 
England, but whether Devon or Cornwall was 
his native county is uncertain. One of his son's 
friends describes him as a " native of Devon," 
but his daughter remembered hearing him say 
that he came from Land's End. The presence 
of Thomas Keats at the Finsbury livery-stable 
is accounted for by his holding the position of 
head ostler, and that he was no ordinary head 
ostler is proved by the fact that the proprietor, 
Mr. John Jennings, made no opposition to his 
marriage with his daughter, Frances. His famous 
son appears to have reproduced his personal ap- 
pearance, making it certain that we may imagine 
Thomas Keats as of small stature but of viva- 
cious expression ; while regarding his mental 
equipment Charles Cowden Clarke, who was 
schoolmate with the poet, testifies that Thomas 

214 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Keats was "of so remarkably fine a common 
sense and native respectability that I perfectly 
remember the warm terms in which his de- 
meanour used to be canvassed by my parents 
after he had been to visit his boys." 

It was not the least of the many misfortunes 
of Keats that he was deprived so early in life of 
so estimable a father. No doubt the seeds of 
consumption, to which he fell an untimely vic- 
tim, were fatally rooted in his constitution from 
an early year, but it is impossible to resist the 
conclusion that monetary anxieties contributed 
not a little to his early death. Nor is it possible 
to overlook the adverse influence upon one of 
such delicate health of the acrimonious disputes 
which the obstinacy of the family guardian, Mr. 
Abbey, made of frequent occurrence. From 
both these disturbing factors Keats would have 
been free had his father lived. But it was not to 
be. Ere the poet had reached his ninth year his 
father was dead. How he met his death is re- 
lated in the following paragraph, which appeared 
in the " Times " of Tuesday, April 17, 1804 : 

" On Sunday Mr. Keats, livery-stable keeper 
in Moorfields, went to dine at Southgate ; he 
returned at a late hour, and on passing down 

215 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the City-road, his horse fell with him, when he 
had the misfortune to fracture his skull. It was 
about one o'clock in the morning when the watch- 
man found him, he was at that time alive, but 
speechless ; the watchman got assistance, and 
took him to a house in the neighbourhood, where 
he died about 8 o'clock." 

When this bereavement overtook Keats, he 
was at Enfield, a pupil in the school of the Rev. 
John Clarke. It is many years now since that 
building was pulled down to make room for a 
railway station, but happily a portion of the 
structure still survives, and is now illustrated 
for the first time in connection with the poet's 
career. Of the history of this house, Cowden 
Clarke, the son of the master of the school, nar- 
rates that it "had been built by a West India 
merchant in the latter end of the seventeenth 
or beginning of the eighteenth century. It was 
of the better character of the domestic archi- 
tecture of that period, the whole front being 
of the purest red brick, wrought by means of 
moulds into rich designs of flowers and pome- 
granates, with heads of cherubim over niches in 
the centre of the building." Because it was such 
an excellent example of the early Georgian 
216* 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




Facade of Keats's Schoolhouse 



domestic architecture, and not because it formed 
part of the building in which Keats was edu- 
cated, the facade of this Enfield schoolhouse 
escaped the usual fate of demolished bricks 
and mortar, and may now be seen in an annex 

217 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of the South Kensington Museum, London, 
amid a motley collection of ship models and 
bottled monstrosities. Perhaps the warning may 
be offered that it will be idle for the pilgrim 
to question the museum authorities as to the 
whereabouts of the schoolhouse of John Keats ; 
they are, or were, ignorant that such a treasure 
is in their charge ; but if inquiry be made, as per 
the catalogue, for the " specimen of old English 
ornamental brick work and carving from an old 
house at Enfield, Middlesex," the seeker will in 
due time be rewarded by gazing upon at least 
a portion of the building which is our earliest 
surviving link with the life of Keats. It will 
be seen how accurate and justifiable is Cowden 
Clarke's eulogistic description of this fragment of 
his old home, and now that its association with 
the school-days of the poet is placed on record it 
may be hoped that something will be done to 
make that fact emphatic for the information of 
all future visitors to the museum. 

Although Cowden Clarke was the elder of 
Keats by some seven years, a close friendship 
between the two appears to have been a matter 
of early and rapid growth. And this friendship 
had momentous consequences in two directions. 
It seems probable that Keats was first encour- 

218 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

aged to make trial of his poetic powers by the 
son of his schoolmaster, and in any case that 
son was responsible for introducing the young 
poet to Leigh Hunt, and thus indirectly opened 
the doorway through which Keats made his 
entrance into the literary coteries of those days. 
Keats, in fact, was singularly fortunate in his 
friends. " The days of the years of his life," 
writes Mr. Sidney Colvin in the closing words 
of his sympathetic study, "were few and evil, 
but above his grave the double aureole of poetry 
and friendship shines immortally." Much of 
that good fortune he owed to his own character. 
All who knew Keats personally unite in offering 
glowing testimony to his lovable nature. One 
testified, " A sweeter tempered man I never 
knew;" another, in the retrospect of twenty 
years, spoke of him as one "whose genius I 
did not, and do not, more fully admire than 
I entirely loved the man ; " while a third, writing 
when the poet's final illness was hastening to its 
close, said, " He must get well again, if but for 
me — I cannot afford to lose him." Such a man 
deserved the best of friends, and in the case of 
Keats deserts were, for once, rewarded as they 
should be. 

Perhaps, however, the fortune of the poet in 
219 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

this matter was not wholly without blemish. It 
is allowable, for example, to doubt whether the 
friendship of Leigh Hunt was entirely beneficial 
for Keats. On its social side it was, no doubt, a 
valuable asset, but the literary influence of Hunt 
must be charged with retarding the ripening 
of the younger poet's powers, and that Keats 
was generally regarded as a " follower " of the 
"Examiner's" editor undoubtedly prejudiced his 
chances of receiving fair play in the literary crit- 
icism of the time. Had Keats never made the 
acquaintance of Leigh Hunt, it is more than 
probable that he would never have been chosen 
to stand in the pillory for the amusement of the 
readers of " Blackwood " and the " Quarterly." 

Of more limited value still was the friendship 
of the painter Hay don. Keats was usually so 
sane in his judgments of men, had such an un- 
erring eye for their defects and weaknesses, that 
it is amazing his head should have been turned 
by Haydon's notice and speedy offer of friend- 
ship. He took the painter at his own estimate, 
and readers of Haydon's "Autobiography" do not 
need to be informed how colossal that estimate 
was. No wonder, then, that Keats was beside 
himself with joy when the mighty painter prom- 
ised to make " a finished chalk sketch " of his 

220 



IN OLD ENGLAND 



head to serve as a frontispiece for " Endymion," 
coupling the promise with the characteristic 
assertion that he 
had " never done 
the thing for any 
human being," 
and that, as he in- 
tended signing it, 
the drawing "must 
have considerable 
effect." It was 
also characteristic 
that the promise 
was not kept. 
Still, posterity 
owes some debt to 
the friendship of 

Haydon, for it was he who executed the life- 
mask of Keats which his sister declared to be 
the best likeness ever made of her brother. 

Notwithstanding these limitations, it still holds 
good that Keats was singularly fortunate in his 
friends and if he had been asked which of those 
friends he valued most, his reply would un- 
doubtedly have been in favour of John Hamilton 
Reynolds. Such a verdict must be concurred in 
by every student of the poet, and it should be 

221 




Haydox's Life-mask of Keats 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



placed to the credit of Leigh Hunt that the intro- 
duction was effected through him. This friend- 
ship naturally gave Keats admission to the family 
circle of the Reynoldses in their home in Little 
Britain, and that he valued the privilege is mani- 
fest from more than one passage in his letters. 
It was a privilege he shared in common with 
Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood, and many 

other literary aspi- 
rants of the early 
nineteenth cen- 
tury. That fact 
alone might be 
sufficient to stamp 
the Reynoldses as a 
remarkable family. 
But other proofs 
are available. 

Only a bare fact 
or two is known 
about the father. 
He was mathe- 
matical and head 

John- Hamilton Reynolds Writing master in 

Christ's Hospital, 
and had, according to the testimony of one of 
his grandsons, a rooted objection to having his 




IN OLD ENGLAND 

personal appearance delineated in any way. 
Hence, although two of his grandsons were 
skilled artists, and his son-in-law, Thomas Hood, 







'-. ""-I- ■-•'H,^ ^-'l 




P*§3tt 


\j 






*'~ffi- ' y* ^ 







Mr. Reynolds, Snr. 

made many efforts to persuade him to give some 
painter a sitting, a rough pen sketch is practi- 
cally the only likeness that exists. As will be 
seen from the reproduction, it depicts him as a 
quaintly garbed, jolly old gentleman, ready for 

223 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 




such practical jokes as we know he was willing 
to share in when visiting Hood. Perhaps this 
view of his character is scarcely confirmed by 
the presentment of him which figures in a sketch 
Hood made of the wedding of his sister-in-law 

Mariane Reynolds, 
but one hardly 
looks for likenesses 
in caricatures of 
that kind. 

Charlotte Rey- 
nolds, the mother, 
had aspirations of 
a literary kind, 
though we get no 
hint of that fact 
from the letters of 
Keats. He was 
dead, however, be- 
fore Mrs. Reynolds 
courted fame with 
her one and only book, the title of which ran : 
" Mrs. Leslie and Her Grandchildren : A Tale. 
By Mrs. Hamerton." There is a copy of this 
modest little volume in the British Museum, 
but there is no evidence to show whether it 
secured much or little favour with the public. 

224 




S? : t^ 



Mrs. Reynolds, Snr. 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Hood appears to have sent a copy to Charles 
Lamb, and his opinion of the effort will be found 
elsewhere. The portrait of Mrs. Reynolds was 
painted at Hood's house at Wanstead, and is the 
only counterfeit in existence of a woman who 
deserves well of the student of literature for the 
unfailing hospitality she extended to so many of 
its famous sons. 

There were four daughters in the Reynolds 
family, of whom one, Jane, as hinted above, be- 
came the wife of Thomas Hood. The eldest, 
Mariane, married Mr. Green, and had for her 
two sons the gifted artists Charles and Towneley 
Green. It was to celebrate her wedding that 
Hood drew the water-colour sketch which will 
be found in another part of this volume. In 
the foreground of this sketch the third sister, 
Charlotte, occupies a prominent position, with a 
hooked arm outstretched in a vain endeavour 
— such was Hood's jest — to emulate her sister 
in catching a husband. The antipathy of Mr. 
Reynolds senior to having his portrait taken in 
any way seems to have been shared by his eldest 
daughter Mariane, for she would never give a 
sitting even to one of her two artist sons. Hence 
the only likeness surviving of this friend of Keats 
is the meagre pen and ink sketch reproduced. 

15 225 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

With the father and mother and the four 
sisters Keats enjoyed much friendly intercourse, 
though towards the close of his life, for reasons 







Mrs. Green, nie Mariane Reynolds 

which it is not necessary to recapitulate, the sis- 
ters lost some of his regard. But in his friend- 
ship for their brother, John Hamilton Reynolds, 
there was no rift from beginning to end. Of all 
his literary associates, he was the most congenial 
spirit, and Lord Houghton rightly insists upon 
the " invaluable worth of his friendship." On 

226 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

this point the testimony of Mr. Sidney Colvin 
may also be cited, for he is at one with all the 
biographers of Keats in affirming Reynolds to 
have been one of the poet's wisest friends, and 
points out that he " by judicious advice more 
than once saved him from a mistake." 

Although nearly a year younger than Keats, 
Reynolds preceded him in the publication of a 
volume of verse by three years, and had, indeed, 
placed no fewer than four books to his credit ere 
Keats issued his first volume. Reynolds was 
only eighteen when, in 1814, he published his 
first work " Safie, an Eastern Tale." As the 
poem was frankly imitative of Byron, and in- 
scribed to him, it was natural that Reynolds 
should forward an early copy to that poet. Al- 
though he was accustomed to attentions of that 
kind, Byron took the earliest opportunity of ac- 
knowledging the book and its dedication, and his 
letter is interesting, not only for its opinion of 
Reynolds but also for its personal note. It is 
dated Feb. 20, 1814. 

"Sir, — My absence from London till within 
these last few days and business since have 
hitherto prevented my acknowledgment of the 
volume I have lately received and the inscrip- 

2'27 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

tion it contains, for both of which I beg leave to 
return you my thanks and best wishes for the 
success of your book and its author. The poem 
itself as the work of a young man is highly 
creditable to your talents, and promises better 
for future efforts than any which I can now 
recollect. Whether you intend to pursue your 
poetical career 1 do not know and can have no 
right to enquire, but in whatever channel your 
abilities are directed, I think it will be your own 
fault if they do not eventually lead to distinc- 
tion. Happiness must of course depend upon 
conduct, but even fame itself would be but 
poor compensation for self-reproach. You will 
excuse me for talking to a man perhaps not 
many years my junior with these grave airs of 
seniority, but though I cannot claim much ad- 
vantage in that respect it was my lot to be 
thrown very early upon the world, to mix a 
good deal in it in more climates than one, and 
to purchase experience which would probably 
have been of greater service to any one than 
myself. But my business with you is in your 
capacity of author, and to that I will confine 
myself. 

" The first thing a young writer must expect 
and yet can least of all suffer is criticism. I did 

228 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

not bear it. A few years and many changes 
have since passed over my head, and my reflec- 
tions on that subject are attended with regret. I 
find on dispassionate comparison my own re- 
venge was more than the provocation warranted. 
It is true I was young ; that might be an excuse 
to those I attacked, but to me it is none. The 
best reply to all objections is to write better, and 
if your enemies will not then do you justice the 
world will. On the other hand, you should not 
be discouraged ; to be opposed is not to be van- 
quished, though a timid mind is apt to mistake 
every scratch for a mortal wound. There is a 
saying of Dr. Johnson's which it is well to re- 
member that ' No man was ever written down 
except by himself.' ( 

" I sincerely hope that you will meet with as 
few obstacles as yourself can desire, but^if you 
should you will find that they are to be stepped 
over ; to kick them down is the first resolve of a 
young and fiery spirit, a pleasant thing enough 
at the time, but not so afterwards. On this 
point I speak of a man's own reflections after- 
wards ; what others think or say is a secondary 
consideration, at least it has been with me, but 
will not answer as a general maxim. He who 
would make his way in the world must let the 
229 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

world believe that it made it for him, and 
accommodate himself to the minutest of its 
regulations. 

" I beg leave once more to thank you for your 
pleasing present, and have the honour to be 

" Your obliged and very obedient servant, 

" Byron." 

Although Keats and Reynolds were not blind 
to the weaknesses of Wordsworth, they had — 
which is more to their credit considering the 
general critical attitude of their day towards the 
Lake poet — a keen appreciation of the undying 
qualities of his best work. In one of his earliest 
sonnets Keats gave worthy and unstinted homage 
to the poet 

" Who on Helvellyn's summit, wide awake, 
Catches his freshness from Archangel's wing ;" 

and when Haydon proposed to send a copy of 
the sonnet to Wordsworth the idea put the 
young poet " out of breath." You know, he 
added, " with what reverence I would send my 
well- wishes to him." As this homage was shared 
by Reynolds, it is not surprising that he should 
have sent a copy of his fourth book, " The Naiad : 
a Tale," published in 1816, to Rydal Mount. 

230 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Wordsworth's reply, not before published, is as 
characteristic as the acknowledgment Byron 
made of the " Safie " volume. In their several 




Mrs. John Hamilton Reynolds 



ways, these two epistles are not unworthy addi- 
tions to the Letters to Young Authors which are 
so plentiful in English literary correspondence ; 
and it is noteworthy that Wordsworth as well as 



231 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Byron is at pains to prepare Reynolds for the 

inevitable depressing effect of criticism. Here is 

Wordsworth's letter, dated from Rydal Mount, 
Nov. 28, 1816 : 

" My dear Sir, — A few days ago I received 
a parcel through the hands of Messrs. Longman 
containing your poem 'The Naiad, etc.,' and a 
letter, accompanying it, for both which marks of 
your attention you will accept my cordial thanks., 
Your poem is composed with elegance and in a 
style that accords with the subject, but my 
opinion on this point might have been of more 
value if I had seen the Scottish ballad on which 
your work is founded. You do me the honour of 
asking me to find fault in order that you may 
profit by my remarks. ' 1 remember when I was 
young in the practice of writing praise was pro- 
digiously acceptable to me and censure most 
distasteful, nay, even painful. For the credit of 
our nature I would fain persuade myself to this 
day that the extreme labour and tardiness with 
which my compositions were brought forth had 
no inconsiderable influence for exciting both 
those sensations. Presuming, however, that you 
have more philosophy than I was master of at, 
that time, I will not scruple to say that your 

232 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

poem would have told more upon me, if it had 
been shorter./ How unceremoniously not to say- 
ungraciously do I strike home ! But I am justi- 
fied to my own mind from a persuasion that it 
was better to put the objection in this abrupt 
way, than to introduce it by an accompanying 
compliment which, however well merited, would 
have stood in the way of the effect which I aim 
at — your reformation. Your fancy is too luxu- 
riant, and riots too much upon its own creations. 
Can you endure to be told by one whom you are 
so kind as to say you respect that in his judg- 
ment your poem would be better without the 
first 57 lines (not condemned for their own 
sakes), and without the last 146, which never- 
theless have in themselves much to recommend 
them. The basis is too narrow for the super- 
structure, and to me it would have been more 
striking barely to have hinted at the deserted 
Fair One and to have left it to the imagination 
of the reader to dispose of her as he liked. Her 
fate dwelt upon at such length requires of the 
reader a sympathy which cannot be furnished 
without taking the Nymph from the unfathom- 
able abyss of the cerulean waters and beginning 
afresh upon terra firma, ' I may be wrong but 
I speak as I felt, and the most profitable criticism 

233 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

is the record of sensations, provided the person 
affected be under no partial influence. 

" I am gratified by your favourable opinion of 
my labours. As a slight return for your oblig- 
ing attentions will you accept of a copy of my 
' Thanksgiving Ode ' and ' Letter upon Bacon,' 
which will be put into your hands if you will 
take the trouble of presenting the underwritten 
order to Messrs. Longman. When you call 
there, will you be so kind as to mention that I 
have received complaints from Edinburgh that 
these two publications have not arrived there as 
was expected, agreeable to the directions which I 
had given. 

" Pray beg of Messrs. Longman that as many 
copies of each as I requested may be sent 
forthwith. 

" I am, dear Sir, with great respect, 
" Your obliged servant, 

" W. Wordsworth." 

Although Wordsworth's letter can hardly have 
been regarded by Reynolds as so encouraging as 
Byron's, yet, allowing for the difference in the 
men, he would have been justified in deriving 
some satisfaction from its contents. At any 
rate, the fact that he did not post a copy of his 

234 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

next poem to Rydal Mount must not be hastily 
interpreted as a proof that he was annoyed with 
Wordsworth for his plain speaking. There was 
another, and far more understandable, reason why 
he did not venture to trouble Wordsworth again. 
That reason opens up an interesting, but little 
known, by-path in English literary history, and 
explains how it came to pass that there are three 
poems bearing the title of " Peter Bell." 

Reynolds, in common with Keats and all the 
literary members of their " set," opposed to the 
last Wordsworth's pet theory that the humblest 
incidents of lowly life described in the most 
homely way were " within the compass of poetic 
probability ; " even more were they offended with 
Wordsworth for his perverse persistence in em- 
ploying vulgar or ridiculous names for the titles of 
his poems or for the cognomens of the characters 
in those poems. Wordsworth was perfectly aware 
of this feeling among his most ardent admirers 
and advocates, but, with characteristic confidence 
in his own judgment, he kept calmly on his way, 
perpetrating title after title and name after name 
of such a nature as caused his friends fresh grief 
and gave his foes renewed justification for their 
scoffing. Early in the year 1819, an announce- 
ment was made in the papers to the effect that a 

235 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

new poem by Mr. Wordsworth, entitled " Peter 
Bell," would shortly be published. This was the 
last straw for Reynolds, whose bright wit saw 
in the bare announcement an opportunity of 
showing Wordsworth by means of parody how 
open to ridicule his titles were. As will be seen 
in the sequel, the idea was as rapidly executed 
as it was conceived, and consequently the " Peter 
Bell " of Reynolds was published before the 
"Peter Bell" of Wordsworth. The situation 
must have been somewhat perplexing to the 
book-buyer of 1819, though as the title-page of 
the spurious " Peter Bell " did not give any 
authors name, and bore the motto, " I do affirm 
I am the real simon pure," the knowing ones 
may have guessed the fraud. 

Not so, however, Coleridge. Isolated, in his 
Highgate retreat, from the literary society of 
the day, he had to rely largely upon his news- 
paper for news of the world of books, and 
although the announcement of Wordsworth's 
forthcoming poem seems to have escaped him, the 
intimation of Reynolds's "Peter Bell" did not. 
That intimation caused him many moments of 
uneasiness, as the ensuing correspondence, hith- 
erto unpublished, will show. Shortly after "Peter 
Bell " had been issued from the press, on the 16th 

236 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of April, 1819, to be explicit, the publishers of 
Reynolds's parody, Messrs. Taylor and Hessey — 
who were also the generous publishers and unfail- 
ing friends of Keats— were doubtless considerably 
astonished to receive the following letter from 
Coleridge, written on that day from Highgate : 

"Dear Sirs, — I hope, nay I feel confident, 
that you will interpret this note in its real sense, 
namely, as a proof of the esteem and respect 
which I entertain towards you both. Looking 
in the ' Times ' this morning I was startled by an 
advertisement of ' Peter Bell : a Lyrical Ballad,' 
with a very significant motto from one of our 
comedies of Charles II's reign, tho' what it sig- 
nifies I wish to ascertain. ' Peter Bell ' is a poem 
of Mr. Wordsworth's, and I have not heard that 
it has been published by him. If it have, and 
with his name (1 have reason to believe that 
he never publishes anonymously), and this now 
advertised be a ridicule upon it, I have nothing 
to say. But if it have not, I have ventured to 
pledge myself for you that you would not wit- 
tingly give the high respectability of your names 
to an attack upon a Manuscript work, which no 
man could assail but by a base breach of trust. 
Merciful Heavens ! no one could dare read a copy 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of verses at his own fireside, if such a practice 
were endured by honest men ! And that the 
poem itself should have been published by you, 
unless with Mr. Wordsworth's consent, is morally 
impossible. 

"I just remember the first lines of Mr. W.'s 
* Peter Bell ' : 

' There 's something in a flying horse, 
There 's something in a huge balloon ; 
But through the air I '11 never float 
Until I get a little boat, 
In shape just like the crescent moon. 

And I have got a little boat.' etc. 

Had it been in my power I should have gone 
to town, to see what this ' Peter Bell ' (the true 
Simon Pure) is, and to have rectified any mis- 
take I may have made (though I can imagine no 
other but that the poem may have been pub- 
lished by Mr. Wordsworth and I have not heard 
of it), without mention of my preceding appre- 
hensions. But as I could not do this, and felt 
really uneasy, I resolved to throw myself on your 
good opinion of the sincerity with which I sub- 
scribe myself, dear Sirs, 

" Yours most respectfully, 

" S. T. Coleridge." 

238 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Coleridge had no cause to complain of his 
reply. His letter was probably sent by hand, 
for the answer Messrs. Taylor and Hessey re- 
turned bears the same date as Coleridge's epistle 
of enquiry, and it deserves to be cited in full, not 
only because it gives the genesis of Reynolds's 
parody, but also because it faithfully reflects the 
real distress which Wordsworth's insistence on 
his theory caused his most sincere admirers. The 
explanatory letter was in these terms : 

" Dear Sir, — We enclose the little work 
which has occasioned you so much perplexity, 
and we trust that when you have looked it over 
we shall still retain your good opinion. 

" It was written by a sincere admirer of Mr. 
Wordsworth's poetry, by a person who has been 
his advocate in every place where he found op- 
portunity of expressing an opinion on the sub- 
ject, and we really think that when the original 
poem is published he will feel all the intense 
regard for the beauties which distinguishes the 
true lover of Mr. Wordsworth's poetry. The 
immediate cause of his writing this burlesque 
imitation of the ' Idiot Boy ' was the announce- 
ment of a new poem with so untimely a title as 
that of ' Peter Bell.' He thought that all Mr. 

239 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Wordsworth's excellencies might be displayed in 
some work which should be free from those ridic- 
ulous associations which vulgar names give rise 
to, and as a Friend he felt vexed that unneces- 
sary obstacles were thus again thrown in the way 
of Mr. Wordsworth's popularity. 

" You do not know the author, nor are we 
at liberty to mention his name. There was no 
malice prepense in the undertaking, we can as- 
sure you, for we happen to know that it was 
written in five hours after he first thought of 
such a thing, and it was printed in as many 
more. He never heard a line of the original 
poem, nor did he know that it was in existence 
till he saw the name in the advertisement. 

" We are placed in a situation which enables 
us to see the effect of those peculiarities which 
this writer wishes Mr. Wordsworth to renounce, 
and we must say that they grieve his friends, 
gladden his adversaries, and are the chief, if not 
the only, impediments to the favourable reception 
of his poems among all classes of readers." 

Coleridge's reply to this admirable letter from 
Messrs. Taylor and Hessey is not dated, but he 
seems to have sent it as speedily as an attack 
of influenza would allow him. There are many 

240 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

points of interest in his letter, not the least being 
the expression of his opinion on the prose parts 
of Reynolds's squib. 

" Dear Siks, — The influenza, which is at 
present going about, has honoured me with its 
particular attention, in the form of fever, weight 
in my limbs, and this from the day I received 
your letter and the ' True Simon Pure. ' Tho' I 
write with difficulty, I will not longer delay to 
assure you that I would not have subjected 
myself to the possible charge of impertinent 
interference, had I then been aware that Mr. 
Wordsworth's poem had been announced pub- 
licly, for it is now many years since I have been 
in correspondence with him by letters. It is, 
according to my principles, all fair. The 
satirist pretends to know nothing of the author 
but what he has drawn from his printed works, 
and implies nothing against his person and char- 
acter. All else is matter of taste. I laughed 
heartily at all the prose, notes included, and am 
confident should have done so and yet more 
heartily had I been myself the barb of the joke. 
The writer, however, ought (as a man, I mean) 
to recollect that Mr. Wordsworth for full 16 
years had been assailed, weekly, monthly, and 

K) 241 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

quarterly, with every species of wanton detrac- 
tion and contempt ; that my ' Literary life ' was 
the first critique which, acknowledging and ex- 
plaining his faults (as a poet), weighed them 
fairly against his merits (and is there a poet now 
alive who will pretend to believe himself equal 
in genius to Wordsworth ?) ; that during all these 
years Mr. Wordsworth made no answer, displayed 
no resentment ; and, lastly, that from Cicero 
to Luther, Giordano Bruno, Milton, Dryden, 
Wolfe, John Brown, Hunter, etc., etc., I know 
but one instance (that of Benedict Spinoza) 
of a man of great genius and original mind 
who on those very accounts had been abused, 
misunderstood, decried and (as far as the several 
ages permitted) persecuted, who has not been 
worried at last with a semblance of Egotism. 
The verdict of Justice is ever the same, as to 
the quantum of credit due to a man compara- 
tively — if the whole or perhaps more than the 
whole is given to a man by his contemporaries 
generally what wonder if he feels little temp- 
tation to claim any in his own name ? 

"As to the poem of the satirist, it seems to 
me like many of its predecessors of the same 
sort. A. we are to suppose writes like a simple- 
ton ; and B. writes tenfold more simpletonish — 

242 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

ergo B.'s wilful idiocy is a witty satire on A.'s 
childishness ! At the best this is but mimicry, 
buffoonery, not satire. When a man can imitate 
even stupidly the blunders of a Dogberry so as 
to render them, as Shakespeare does, the vehicles 
of the most exquisite sense — this is indeed wit ! 
But be the verses what they may, they are all 
mostly fair, and the preface and notes are very 
droll and clever." 

A word or two may be devoted to rounding 
off the history of the "Peter Bell" poems. 
Wordsworth, it should be noted, did not regard 
the parody from the standpoint of Coleridge ; 
his lack of humour prevented that ; and so far 
from laughing heartily over any part of the 
book, it gave him great offence. Keats wrote 
a characteristic review of Reynolds's effort, quo- 
ting a few verses and some of the prose notes, 
and it was this review which aroused Shelley's 
interest in the matter, and led to the writing of 
his "Peter Bell the Third." That title must 
have puzzled many readers who were ignorant 
of Reynolds's "Peter Bell," the "ante-natal 
Peter," as Shelley christened it. 

When the letters from Byron, Wordsworth, 
and Coleridge, given above, are considered in 

243 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

their cumulative judgment of Reynolds's literary- 
gifts ; when it is recalled that Byron thought his 
" Peter Bell" was the work of Moore ; when we 
remember that his collaboration with Thomas 
Hood in the " Odes and Addresses to Great 
People" resulted in a volume which Coleridge 
was certain had been written by Lamb ; and 
when we are reminded that in a later work, 
" The Garden of Florence," Reynolds showed a 
marked ripening of his literary gifts, we are 
tempted to wonder what mischance of fate has 
prevented him from surviving in English liter- 
ature save as the friend of Keats. After all, we 
must not judge too harshly the contemporaneous 
reception of Keats's first two volumes. Bring- 
ing to his early work the prejudice in his favour 
which his later and riper verse has created, we 
cannot enter fully into the feelings of those who 
had only the "Poems" of 1817 and "Endym- 
ion" before them. It may seem rash to aver 
that but for the " Lamia " volume Keats's name 
would indeed have been written in water, and 
yet that is a conclusion which can hardly be 
avoided by any one who compares the " Poems " 
and " Endymion " with the best work of Rey- 
nolds. It is true that even the earliest work of 
Keats has here and there streaks of the fine ore 

244 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of his own peculiar genius, but in its total effect 
it hardly reaches a much higher level than Rey- 
nolds attained. But to discuss this question 
would be too lengthy a task. Reynolds was one 
of the many — perhaps the best equipped of the 
many — of those friends of Keats who seemed to 
have received the call of the Muse. Yet only 
one was chosen. And Reynolds would not have 
had it otherwise. " I," wrote Keats to Reynolds, 
" have been getting more and more close to you, 
every day, since I knew you ; " to Jane Rey- 
nolds he wrote that henceforth he should con- 
sider her brother John his own brother also ; and 
in the last letter he penned, when the death 
dews were gathering on his brow in far-off 
Rome, he turned in tender thought to the friend 
he loved and told how he could not write to him 
because it was not possible to send a good 
account of his health. Reynolds did not fail of 
equal affection. " I set my heart," he wrote to 
Keats, " on having you high, as you ought to be. 
Do you get Fame, and I shall have it in being 
your affectionate and steady friend." Both those 
desires have been fulfilled. So long as the 
pathetic story of John Keats is told in English 
literature, fame will not be wanting for his 
friend John Hamilton Reynolds. 

245 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Tempted by the interest attaching to the 
above-quoted letters from Byron, Wordsworth, 
and Coleridge, and by the opportunity they 
afforded of doing some justice to the memory of 
Keats's best and wisest friend, other friends of the 
poet have been lost sight of for the time. Before 














Record in the Pupil's Entry Book of Guy's Hospital, London 



returning to them, however, something may be 
attempted towards setting at rest several points 
relating to the career of Keats as a medical 
student. 

When the poet had reached his fifteenth year, 
his self-willed guardian, Mr. Richard Abbey, 
decided that he should be bound apprentice 
to Mr. Thomas Hammond, an apothecary at 
Edmonton, and because Keats left Mr. Ham- 

246 



IX OLD ENGLAND 

mond before the natural term of his apprentice- 
ship it has always been concluded that some 
serious estrangement arose between the two. 
This conclusion appears to have been based 
solely on an expression used by Keats when, 
wishing to illustrate the changes which take 
place in the tissues of the human body, he said, 



Record in the Pupils' Entry Book of Guy's Hospital, London 

" Seven years ago it was not this hand which 
clenched itself at Hammond." This appears to 
be but a slight foundation upon which to found a 
theory of a quarrel, especially when documentary 
records of the poet's student days are taken into 
account. Those records also seem to throw some 
light on the date at which Keats entered upon a 
further study of the medical profession at Guy's 
Hospital, London. He is supposed to have gone 
thither in the fall of 1814, whereas the records in 

247 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

question reveal that it was not until the fall of the 
following year. An examination of the records 
at Guy's shows that the authorities in those days 
were in the habit of keeping duplicate books of 
the entries of pupils, the one being in alphabeti- 
cal and the other in chronological order. Now 
both these Pupils' Entry Books agree, as will be 
seen from the reproductions, in giving the name 
of John Keats under the date of October 1st, 
1815, and each shows that the office fee paid 
was £1. 2. 0. That Keats did not begin his 
hospital attendance prior to October 1st, 1815, is 
also proved by an examination of the records of 
the Apothecaries' Hall, London, an extract from 
which is reproduced in these pages for the first 
time. This excerpt illustrates several points. It 
shows, for one thing, that Keats passed his ex- 
amination with credit, — " Examined by Mr. 
Brande and approved" is the endorsement, — 
also that up to that time he had only had a hos- 
pital attendance of six months at Guy's and St. 
Thomas's. As the date of the certificate is July 
25th, 1816, it proves conclusively that Keats did 
not begin his hospital career in 1814 as Mr. Sid- 
ney Colvin asserts. Again, in addition to re- 
cording the actual courses attended by Keats, 
the certificate also bears that the young student 

248 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

came to his examination armed with a testimo- 
nial from Mr. Hammond, and that fact should 
do something towards destroying the " quarrel " 
theory. It only remains to be added that the 
reference in one of the Guy's records to a further 



a Certificate to practise as an Apothecary- in /&,£.. „T77? — ~' 

Au Apprentice to Mr... £;'..,.„ ,?„•- /%£,.,„..,.»-», jS jg-^a Qu- 

Apojhecarv for J Years. ■ / 
Testimo.nlu. from '/?/? fiC*SjZ^^ ^»^»^v*^<^P c. 







LECTURES. 










-2 Courses on 


Anatomy and Physiology. 










2 Theory and Practice of Medicine. 










2 en 


emistry. 










/ M 


ITEBIA MeDICA. 










o Months at 


HOSPITAL ATTENDANCE. 










&^<f>^^fo*> « ■ *y 










Months at 


^A,,^- 


*/'/ 


c^: 


^JT" 


Extract from the 


Register of Apothecaries 


i' Hall, 


London 



twelve-months course by Keats under a " Mr. L." 
is explained by the fact that on March 3d, 1816, 
he was appointed a " dresser of surgeons " under 
Mr. Lucas. On that occasion he paid a fee of 
£25. 4. 0, of which £6. 6. was returned, proba- 
bly owing to his discovery that he was unfit for 

249 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the profession and his consequent resolve to seek 
his life occupation in some other sphere. 

Owing to some of his fellow-students having 
given their reminiscences to the world, it is some- 
times imagined that Keats did not follow his 
medical tuition with any great zest. One such 
has recorded that " in the lecture-room he 
seemed to sit apart, and to be absorbed in some- 
thing else, as if the subject suggested thoughts to 
him which were not practically connected with 
it. He was often in the subject, and out of it, 
in a dreamy way ; " and another, in a somewhat 
similar strain, asserted "even in the lecture- 
room of St. Thomas's, I have seen Keats in a 
deep poetic dream : his mind was on Parnassus 
with the muses." It is more than probable that 
these recollections were coloured by the knowl- 
edge of what Keats eventually became. At any 
rate, one interesting souvenir of his student days 
is preserved among the precious relics belonging 
to Sir Charles W. Dilke in the form of a note- 
book, and these closely-written pages are witness 
to anything save a wandering mind. Besides, 
did he not, in those terrible last days at Rome, 
harrow the spirit of the faithful Severn with a 
minute diagnosis of his own malady, showing 
thereby that it was not with inattentive mind he 

250 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

had listened to the lectures of his professors some 
six years before ? 

Although John Taylor stood to Keats in the 
relation of his publisher, he was in addition one 




Mfsa 
Keats's Note-book as Medical Student 

of his best and most generous friends. On many 
occasions he gave him the practical aid of his 
purse, allowing him to draw at will upon him 
even for work still to be done. For the last 
journey to Rome, Mr. Taylor smoothed the path 
of Keats by handing him £100 for the copyright 
of " Endymion," and when he and Severn were 

251 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

at their wit's end for fresh supplies they were 
rescued by the arrival of a remittance due en- 
tirely to Mr. Taylor's thoughtful kindness. 

As was the custom in the early part of the 
last century, the premises of Messrs. Taylor and 
Hessey at 93 Fleet Street, London, were partly 
devoted to business and partly to residential pur- 
poses. The shop and storerooms of their publish- 
ing business occupied the front of the house in 
Fleet Street itself, but the rooms at the back, 
overlooking the graveyard of St. Bride's Church, 
were, in Keats's days, used by Mr. Taylor as his 
own home, his partner, Mr. Hessey, living else- 
where. To this Fleet Street building came many 
of the choice spirits of that time, including Haz- 
litt, Lamb, Reynolds, Allan Cunningham, and, of 
course, Keats ; and those old windows which used 
to look out on the quiet graves of St. Bride's 
many a time shook with the merriment of those 
convivial gatherings. On other occasions Keats 
was more than a temporary guest here, for Mr. 
Taylor seems always to have had a spare bedroom 
to place at his friend's disposal. Within the last 
decade, considerable alterations in Fleet Street 
have resulted in the demolition of this house of 
such interesting memories, and it is believed 
there is no other record of it in existence apart 

252 




The Back of Mr. Taylor's Fleet Street He 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

from the photograph reproduced in these pages, 
which was taken only a short time before the 
building was condemned. 

Among the numerous portraits of Keats it 
may be questioned whether any is regarded with 
greater general favour than the one by Severn, 
which shows the poet in his study at Hampstead, 
for this seems somehow to suggest the dreamy, 
poetic atmosphere in which he conceived his 
matchless " Ode to a Nightingale." Much atten- 
tion has been devoted recently to the question of 
Keats portraiture, but the subject is by no means 
exhausted. All writers on this matter appear to 
have entirely overlooked the remark of Cowden 
Clarke — no mean judge, by the way — that the 
portrait of Wouvermans by Rembrandt in the 
Dulwich Gallery is a " curiously unconscious 
likeness " of Keats. Again, the same early friend 
calls attention to the portrait showing him with 
one leg over the knee of the other, smoothing 
the instep with the palm of his hand. " In that 
action," says Clarke, " I mostly associate him in 
eager parley with Leigh Hunt in his little Yale 
of Health cottage." This interesting portrait 
remains to be published, though not discovered. 

In the sadly chequered life of Keats there is 
no space which seems to shine so brightly with 

255 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the mingled rays of possible restoration to health 
and happy work as the few weeks he spent at 
Winchester with Charles Brown. " The old ca- 
thedral city, with its peaceful closes breathing 
antiquity, its clear-coursing streams and beautiful 
elm-shadowed meadow walks, and the nimble 
and pure air of its surrounding doWns, exactly 
suited Keats, who quickly improved both in 
health and spirits. The days which he spent 
here were the last good days of his life." Under 
the influence of this deceptive flicker, he came 
to that resolve to make the plunge into a Lon- 
don life of journalism. Hence the letter to his 
friend Dilke, begging him to secure a " couple 
of rooms in Westminster. Quietness and cheap- 
ness are the essentials." As Keats was following 
his letter in a few days, Dilke had little time to 
make such choice, and this, together with his 
evident desire to have the poet near him, ac- 
counts for him taking the necessary rooms in 
Great College Street, Westminster, within a 
stone's throw of his own home. Even after 
nearly a hundred years, it would be difficult to 
imagine a thoroughfare more suited to the needs 
of Keats. Though in the heart of London it 
is not of it. Down one side runs the high wall 
of the gardens of Westminster Abbey, and from 

256 




Keats in his Srum 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the upper windows of the old-fashioned houses 
on the opposite side of the street there are 
unique views of that historic building. This was 















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Letter from Keats to Dilke 

as near a reproduction of the restful calm of 
Winchester as all London could furnish. Here, 
if anywhere, the poet would find fit environment 
for the literary work to which he thought he had 
braced himself. 

259 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

But Keats's days of peace and work were alike 
numbered. In London, he was within easy reach 
of Fanny Brawne again, and to be near her was 
to have no rest save when in her actual presence. 
" I can think of nothing else," he wrote ; " I can- 
not exist without you. 1 am forgetful of every- 
thing but seeing you again — my life seems to 
stop there — I see no further." This mood was 
fatal to his scheme of a diligent life in his 
quiet rooms at Westminster ; so the hastily 
taken lodgings were as quickly abandoned, and 
thenceforward, in the close neighbourhood of the 
home of his disturbing mistress, the last sad act in 
the tragedy of this ill-fated spirit moved onwards 
to its solemn close. 

As a final hope, his friends and doctors urged 
trial of a winter in Italy, and he sailed for Naples 
on September 18th, 1820, in the company of 
the devoted Severn. Even in the matter of 
the vessel in which that voyage in hope was 
made, the ill fate of Keats did not desert him. 
Though all visible representation of the " Maria 
Crowther," the boat in question, has long dis- 
appeared, enquiry at Lloyd's has elicited several 
interesting particulars. It has been stated that 
the ship was ill adapted for the conveyance of 
passengers, and that such was quite literally the 

260 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




Great College Street, Westminster 



case may be inferred from the fact that she 
was only of 127 tons register. In the technical 
language of the shipwright, she was " Brigantine 



261 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

rig, with standing bowsprit, square stern, carvel 
built, and eagle's-head figurehead." The " Maria 
Crowther" was built at Chester in 1810, and 
was primarily intended merely to trade between 
Cardiff and Liverpool. Probably the voyage to 



^ fuaM /;/, 



ICAL \V OKKS 



WILLIAM SHAKSTEAKE. 






mi . 



Keats's Copy of Shakespeare 

Naples was only a temporary departure from her 
usual route, for later she evidently returned to 
the St. George's Channel trade, and the vessel 
was wrecked off the Isle of Man on November 
7th, 1837. It seems that the name of the cap- 
tain of the ship was Robert Dawes, and that he 

262 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

never realised the part he had played in the life- 
history of Keats is indicated by the fact that 
none of his descendants remember him to have 
remarked on his having had the poet for a 
passenger. It was from the " Maria Crowther " 




Keats 's Last Sonnet 

that Keats penned that pathetic letter to his friend 
Brown in which he wrote : " Land and sea, weak- 
ness and decline, are the great separators, but 
Death is the great divorcer for ever." 

Among the few books he took with him on this 
voyage Keats included a copy of Shakespeare's 

263 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Poems, the gift of his good friend Reynolds. In 
that old folio volume there are two intensely- 
interesting double pages. The first are at its 
commencement, and while the right-hand leaf 
records the original gift of the volume, the left- 
hand page perpetuates how it was presented by 
Keats to Severn a few weeks before the end, 
and in 1881 passed into the possession of Sir 
Charles W. Dilke, the grandson of one of the 
poet's warmest friends. If, now, the volume is 
opened at the beginning of "A Lover's Com- 
plaint," the opposite page will be seen to bear 
a sonnet in the familiar handwriting of Keats. 
This was his last message to the world. 

Retarded on the voyage down the English 
Channel by adverse winds, the " Maria Crow- 
ther" cast anchor off Lulworth Cove, and thus 
Keats was able to enjoy yet one more day on the 
soil of that land which was so soon to fade from 
his eyes for ever. Returning to the ship in a 
mood of solemn calm, he, that night, with 
thoughts which winged their way once more to 
his betrothed, and with vision fixed upon some 
radiant point in the clear autumnal heavens 
above, found his rare inspiration return yet once 
again. To few poets has it been given to crown 
their work with such perfect lines, or to enshrine 

264 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the memory of their love with their latest singing 
breath. 

" Bright star ! would I were steadfast as thou art — 

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night, 
And watching, with eternal lids apart, 

Like Nature's patient sleepless Eremite, 
The moving waters at their priestlike task 

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, 
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask 

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors : — 
No — yet still steadfast, still unchangeable, 

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, 
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, 

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest ; 
Still, still to hear her tender- taken breath, 
And so live ever, — or else swoon to death." 



26.5 



IX 
IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY 



IX 

IN CARLYLE'S COUNTRY 

" Xo surer does the Auldgarth bridge, that his father helped to 
build, carry the traveller over the turbulent water beneath it, than 
Carlyle s books convey the reader over chasms and confusions, 
where before there was no rvay, or only an inadequate one." 

John Burroughs. 

A small and sleepy Annandale town, a quiet 
road in Chelsea by the side of the Thames — 
these are the shrines sought out with affectionate 
solicitude by the disciples of Thomas Carlyle. 
Each shrine in its way affords the pilgrim much 
satisfaction of spirit. Ecclefechan and the sur- 
rounding country fit in, somehow, with one's 
previous anticipations of what Carlyle's native 
place should be : Cheyne Row, with its atmos- 
phere of solid comfort and stability, seems to 
keep harmony with the victorious life-struggle 
which took end there in the winter of 1881. 

A native of the village where Carlyle was born, 
aware of my intention to visit that spot, offered 
the forbidding warning, " Don't go to Eccle- 
fechan expecting to find worshippers of Carlyle." 
269 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

The warning was not unneeded ; for than Eccle- 
fechan there surely never was a spot where was 
more literally fulfilled the proverb, " A prophet 
is not without honour save in his own country." 
Not once, but many times while plying the 
natives with questions, I was greeted with the 
astonishing query, " Which Carlyle ? " There is 
a tradition in the district that an old roadman, 
now dead, happening to be addressed by a party 
of Carlyle devotees, ran over the names of the 
various members of the family, and dwelt with 
special emphasis upon that of Sandy, " who was 
a rare breeder o' sows." " But there was one 
called Thomas, you know," rejoined the eager 
pilgrims. " Ay," retorted the old roadman, 
" there was Tarn ; he gaed awa up to London, 
but I dinna think he ever did muckle guid." 

Vain indeed, then, is the search of the man 
who goes to Ecclefechan on the lookout for 
worshippers of Carlyle. And, seemingly, it all 
arises from the utilitarian way the natives have 
of regarding the most famous member of the 
Carlyle family. A mild remonstrance addressed 
to the hotel-keeper on his lack of appreciation in 
not at least hanging a portrait of the sage in his 
public room only elicited the grumbling reply, 
" What did he do for the village ? " Annandale 
270 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

people are slow to believe any generosity of 
Thomas Carlyle. If you remind them that he 
gave Craigenputtoch to Edinburgh University, 
they will answer, " It s the only thing he did give 
away ; " and if you tell them of his many private 
benefactions to struggling authors — such as 
those £5 notes to Thomas Cooper with the re- 
mark, "If you don't pay me again 1 11 not hang 
you " — they only stare at you with that hard, 
unbelieving look of theirs. Gifts of the right 
hand unknown of the left are not held in honour 
in Ecclefechan. 

Ecclefechan is not an attractive village. In 
the olden days when a double row of beech trees 
grew by the side of the open burn which ran 
down the middle of the street, it may have been 
more picturesque, yet even in those days Burns 
could describe it as an " unfortunate, wicked little 
village." The beech trees are gone now, and 
only a small part of the burn remains uncovered, 
the latter change being explained by an iron 
tablet in the village, bearing this inscription: — 

" 1875 
209 feet of the Burn below this spot was arched over by 
Dr. George Arnott at his own expense." 

In approaching Ecclefechan from the railway 
station, the pilgrim enters the village by the 

18 273 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 




north end ; and in that case the house in which 
Carlyle was born must be looked for on the right 
hand. The accompanying view of this house 
was taken from the south end of the village, both 
because such a standpoint showed the place at 

its best, and be- 
cause it gave the 
camera the fairest 
chance to secure 
jf * M a good picture. 

Hence the Carlyle 
house is seen on 
the left; and just 
above it the burn 
flows from under 
that archway 
erected by Dr. George Arnott " at his own 
expense." 

Although built more than a hundred years 
ago, the house in which Carlyle was born, called 
Arch House on account of the wide archway 
running from front to back, shows no sign 
of decay. It was built by Carlyle's father, an 
honest mason, who left off rearing houses when 
the old taste for substantial buildings went 
out of fashion. " Nothing that he undertook 
to do,'" witnessed Carlyle, " but he did it faith- 

274 




Arch House, Ecclefechan 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

fully and like a true man. I shall look on the 
houses he built with a certain proud interest. 




Room in which Carlvle was Born 



They stand firm and sound to the heart all over 
his little district. No one that comes after him 
will say ' Here was the finger of a hollow eye 



servant. 



275 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

The tiny room in which Carlyle was born — it 
is at the top of the house in the right-hand cor- 
ner of the picture — is devoted now to the hous- 
ing of some interesting mementos of the infant 
who drew his first breath there on December 4th, 
1795. In one corner an unpretentious bookcase 
holds a copy of the familar brown-covered " Peo- 
ple's Edition " of his writings ; a recess near by 
is filled with bits of old china from the house in 
Cheyne Row ; on the mantelpiece are two turned 
wooden candlesticks, a gift of John Sterling, sent 
from Rome ; a table in the corner provides a 
resting-place for the philosopher's reading-lamp 
and tea-caddy ; and above a framed letter on the 
south wall two of his hats are hung. More 
attention is paid to these hats than to any of the 
other relics. What higher happiness can the 
hero- worshipper wish than the being able to say 
he has had his head inside Carlyle's hat ? Inside 
it goes, in a quite literal sense. Up to the time 
of my visit only twenty-nine heads had been 
found to fit that hat. I regret to add that mine 
did not make the thirtieth. All this applies 
especially to one hat — a black, wide-brimmed 
soft felt, perhaps the identical hat which prompted 
the immortal dialogue between the passenger 
and the 'bus driver. 

276 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" Queer 'at that old fellow 'ad who just 
got in." 

" Queer 'at ! ay, he may wear a queer 'at, but 
what would you give for the 'edpiece that 's in- 
side of it ? " 

The other hat, just as broad-brimmed, but 
straw instead of felt, is none too large for an 
ordinary cranium, — a fact not without its con- 
solatory side. 

Not far from the hats there is a frame of por- 
traits of Carlyle and his wife, somewhat roughly 
mounted, but of exceptional interest. Of Car- 
lyle there are six portraits ; of his wife, four. One 
of the portraits of Carlyle, that bearing the date 
1845, ranks among the earliest likenesses of him 
extant, and has a considerable resemblance to 
that crayon drawing by Samuel Lawrence, of 
which Carlyle thought so highly that he com- 
mended it to Emerson as the one most suitable 
for a frontispiece to the American edition of his 
works. While all the portraits of Carlyle here 
have a considerable resemblance to one another 
and harmonise with most of the portraits that 
have been made of him, those of his wife which 
find a place in this frame, while consistent with 
each other, have little or nothing in common 
with that graceful and handsome young lady 
277 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

who figures in the second volume of Carlyle's 
" Early Letters." In these portraits Mrs. Car- 
lyle's face recalls that of George Eliot. The 
brow is high and massive, the eyes deep sunk 
and sad, the mouth large and cynical. If Mrs. 
Carlyle was ever like her Edinburgh portrait of 
1826, she must have changed amazingly ; if these 
later portraits represent any physiognomic con- 
tinuity, the artist of the Edinburgh portrait 
must have falsified amazingly. One of the pho- 
tographs of Mrs. Carlyle shows her standing be- 
hind a velvet-covered chair, on which her dog 
" Nero " is reclining at ease ; and another photo- 
graph of that small quadruped who was her sole 
companion on the ride from which she returned 
dead may be seen in a different part of the room. 
In the visitors' book at the hotel in Ecclefechan 
I found abundant evidence that America still 
takes a zealous interest in the author of " Sartor 
Resartus." To more than one American name 
I found the legend appended : " On a pilgrim- 
age to Carlyle's country ; " and, as was most 
appropriate, I noticed that in the room where 
Carlyle was born, signs of that interest were 
not lacking. On the table there lay a sub- 
stantial volume of the ledger type, bearing this 
inscription : — 

278 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" Visitors' Book at the Birthplace and Grave of Thomas Carlyle. 
Presented to Mr. Peter Scott of Ecclefechan, Scotland, hy 
Joseph Cook, of Boston, Massachusetts, March 20, 1881." 

In looking at the Arch House from the oppo- 
site side of the road, the spire of the United 
Presbyterian Church is a conspicuous object in 
the background at the right. On the other side 
of that spire is the Ecclefechan kirkyard, where 
Thomas Carlyle is buried. So do the beginnings 
and ends of things meet, — here the room memor- 
able for his birth, there the kirkyard memorable 
for his grave. That spire brings to memory a 
Carlyle story told me in the district. Carlyle 's 
father and the family in general were adher- 
ents of a dissenting congregation known as the 
Seceders or Associate Congregation. But in 
1847, these and other dissenters formed them- 
selves into the United Presbyterian Church ; and 
henceforward the Carlyle family were reckoned 
among its members. By and by the newly 
named congregation addressed itself to the erec- 
tion of a new church, and Carlyle's brother James 
promised a contribution of £50 to the building. 
That £50 was never paid. Whether James 
Carlyle made his promise in good faith none 
can tell ; but it is affirmed that the erection of 
the spire was made the pretext on his part for 
279 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

declining to keep his promise. So the spire cost 
£50 more than its contract price. Nor was that 
all. The incident terminated by James Carlyle 
and his family leaving the United Presbyterian 
Church and becoming members of the Church 
of Scotland congregation at Middlevie. 

Changes take place so slowly in Scottish vil- 
lages that the Ecclefechan of to-day differs but 
little from the Ecclefechan of Carlyle's boyhood. 
Buildings once put to one purpose are now put 
to another ; otherwise they remain now as then. 
So it happens that the humble building in which 
Carlyle laid the foundation of his education is 
still standing, though not now used as a school. 
One end abuts against the side of the United 
Presbyterian Church ; the other merges into the 
wall of the kirkyard where Carlyle is buried. 
Utilised now as a dwelling-house, it is easy to 
recall the days when it was the acadcmia of the 
district, — so close is its likeness to many a 
building in other Scottish villages still devoted 
to educational uses. Little is remembered of 
Carlyle's earliest school-days ; and indeed it is 
hardly to be expected that a boy of five would 
furnish much pabulum for the biographer. A few 
years ago there died in Ecclefechan an aged lady 
who claimed to have attended this school with 

280 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Carlyle ; but her reminiscences did not go be- 
yond that bare fact. The purpose of Carlyle's 
father in sending him to this school, and after- 
ward to Annan Academy and Edinburgh Uni- 
versity is well known ; he had the desire of 




Carlyle's Fikst Schoolhouse 

every Scottish parent to see his son "wag his 
pow in a pu'pit." Of course the worthy man 
was woefully disappointed when his son found 
that such an occupation was impossible for him ; 
but in this, as in so many other unpleasant mat- 
ters, he consumed his own smoke. " His toler- 
ance for me," says Carlyle, " his trust in me was 

281 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

great. When I declined going forward into the 
church though his heart was set upon it, he 
respected my scruples, my volition, and patiently 
let me have my way." 

This self-denial becomes more noteworthy in 
the light of an anecdote related to me in 
Ecclefechan. It had become known in the vil- 
lage that " Tom Carlyle " was destined for the 
Kirk and the village gossips were always pressing 
old James Carlyle with the awkward question, 
" Why is not Tom coming out for the Kirk ? " 
Now the old man was too proud to own his dis- 
appointment to the village gossips, and so one 
day, when the question was more pointedly put 
than usual, he rejoined, " Do you think oor Tarn 
is going to stand up and be criticised by a man 
like Matthie Latimer ? " — the said Matthie 
Latimer being an argumentative theologian of 
the meeting-house, who was always ready with 
his remarks upon the pulpit performances gone 
through there. 

The fate which has befallen the schoolhouse 
has also overtaken the old meeting-house where 
in the early days of last century the young Car- 
lyle heard many an orthodox and long-winded 
discourse. He never forgot those childish expe- 
riences. " Poor temple of my childhood," he 

282 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

wrote sixty years after, " to me more sacred at 
this moment than perhaps the biggest cathedral 
then extant could have been : rude, rustic, 
bare, — no temple in the world was more so, — 
but there were sacred lambencies, tongues of 




The Old Meeting-house, Ecclefechan 



authentic flame from heaven which kindled 
what was best in one, what has not yet gone 
out." It is marvellous to note how vivid Car- 
lyle's recollections were of the serious-faced peas- 
ants who used to frequent that old meeting- 
house ; even when his own long life was drawing 
to a close he could paint their portraits down to 

283 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the smallest detail of dress. Even given such a 
remarkable eye as he had for grasping the 
minutest idiosyncracies of personal appearance, 
he must have enjoyed some favourable coign of 
vantage from which to view those old Seceders, 
Sunday by Sunday. And such he had ; for I 
learned that the Carlyle seat was in the gallery 
of the meeting-house, from whence the bulk of 
worshippers could be carefully surveyed. 

Strongly attached as old James Carlyle was to 
the Seceders, a trivial incident in the history of 
the congregation cut him adrift from them for a 
time. It happened that a new manse was to be 
built for the minister, and there arose a division 
of opinion as to the number of rooms it should 
contain, — James Carlyle voting in favour of 
such a minimum as seemed consistent with a 
creed which laid more emphasis on the next 
world than on this. His views, however, were 
not those of the majority ; and to mark his dis- 
approval of such a worldly policy as was implied 
in the erection of too spacious a manse, he left 
the communion for a time. With characteristic 
Scottish forethought, the old Seceders had sev- 
eral flues placed in their meeting-house at the 
time of its erection, in anticipation of the day 
when the congregation should either dwindle 

284 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

away or by the erection of a new building 
should find it necessary to dispose of the old 
one. It was the latter contingency which arose, 
and the old meeting-house, by reason of its 
flues, was easily transformed into a number of 
tenements. 

Whatever may have been Carlyle's opinion of 
ministers in general, he cherished very affection- 
ately the memory of that aged minister of the 
meeting-house who baptised him, preached to 
him, visited his father's house, and taught him 
Latin. "John Johnstone," he said, "was the 
priestliest man I ever under any ecclesiastical guise 
was privileged to look upon. . . . He sleeps 
not far from my father in the Ecclefechan church- 
yard ; the teacher and the taught. ' Blessed,' I 
again say, ' are the dead that die in the Lord. 
They do rest from their labours ; their works fol- 
low them.'" The monument over the grave of 
this worthy man was built by Carlyle's father, 
and it is an admirable example of the sterling 
honesty of his work as a mason. It is generally 
believed in Ecclefechan that the inscription on the 
monument was composed by Carlyle himself, and 
even if that were not the case it is worth pre- 
serving for the picture it gives of a remarkable 
man : — 

285 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" All that was mortal of 
The Revd. John Johnstone, 
Minister of the Associate Congregation. 
Ecclefechan, 
rests here in hope of the resurrection of life. 
He was born a.d. 17.S0. 
He was ordained a.d. 1760. 
He died May 28th, a.d. 1812, 
in the 82nd year of his age and the 52nd of his 
ministry. 
Endowed with strong natural talents 
Which were 
cultivated by a liberal education 
And sanctified by Divine influence 
He was 
As a scholar respectable 
As a theologian learned 
And as a minister able, faithful and laborious." 

When the mason trade deteriorated to such 
an extent that honest work went out of fashion, 
James Carlyle turned to the occupation of farm- 
ing, " that so he might keep all his family about 
him." The first farm he took was that known 
as Mainhill, situated on the great north road, 
about two miles from Ecclefechan. Here the 
Carlyles lived from 1815 to 1826. It was not 
a desirable farm at that time ; "a wet, clayey 
spot ; " Carlyle describes it, "a place of horrid 
drudgery," and in 1825 he writes to his brother 
Alexander : " I hope my father will not think of 

286 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

burdening himself further with Mainhill and its 
plashy soil when the lease has expired." 

Two anecdotes of the Mainhill days told me in 
the district throw a little light upon the domes- 
tic history of the family at that period. An old 
man, Peter Scott by name, who served on the 
farm at Mainhill as a lad, told my informant that 




Mainhill 

when his day's work was done he took a seat by 
the kitchen fire and "held my head down, for 
fear ane o' them wad begin on me." All the 
Carlyles alike, with the possible exception of the 
mother, were noted and feared and hated in 
Ecclefechan for their caustic tongues ; and this 
incident of the serving lad holding his head down 
for fear one of the family might begin on him 
throws that hatred into sharp relief. 

The other anecdote concerns the father alone, 

2S7 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

and is valuable as indicating the origin of Carlyle's 
apostrophising habit. A gang of saw-millers 
had put up at Mainhill, increasing to an un- 
usual size the company which gathered round 
the old man when he conducted family worship. 
His consecutive reading had brought him to that 
chapter of Genesis where Potiphar's wife figures 
so infamously with Joseph, and he read it through 
with his severest enunciation, closing the book 
with emphatic action as he shouted, " And thou 
wast a b — ! " — a coarse canine word which seems 
to have been often on his lips. 

When his wife was in that unsettled mental 
state which ultimately prompted her removal 
from home for a short time, she did a deed that 
afterwards grieved and appalled herself. Seeing 
the old man stooping with a pail for water at the 
well, she stole forward and pushed him bodily in. 
Then in a state of mortal terror she rushed into 
the house, expecting him to well-nigh slay her in 
an ungovernable passion. To her amazement, 
however, when she was singing at the pitch of 
her voice in the pretence of fearing him not, 
he entered quite calmly and saluted her with, 
" Well, thou art a merry b — ! " 

The wife of the present tenant of Mainhill was 
kind enough to show me over the house, pointing 

288 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

out the rooms which were in existence when the 
Carlyles lived there, and the additions which 
had been made since. Mr. J. A. Froude in- 
formed me that in my photograph Mainhill is 
twice the size it used to be ; and he added that 
Carlyle always had unpleasant remembrances of 
that place. The chief addition to the house is 
the two-storied wing which occupies the fore- 
ground of the picture, other alterations in the 
rear not affecting the size of the building so much 
as its convenience. 

At one period in the early life of Carlyle, 
when the church, law, and tutoring had each 
failed to provide him with an occupation, it oc- 
curred to him that he might solve the problem 
of his life by taking a small farm in his native 
district, where he could study and write in peace, 
while one of his brothers attended to the prac- 
tical work of the holding. " A house in the 
country, and a horse to ride on, I must and 
will have if it is possible." This was the mes- 
sage which set the Mainhill people on the look- 
out ; and soon they were able to report that in 
the small farm of Hoddam Hill they had secured 
the place he needed. Accordingly Carlyle took 
possession of Hoddam Hill farm at the Whit- 
sunday term, 1825, his mother going with him 

19 289 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

as housekeeper, and his brother Alick as practical 
farmer. 

For a wonder, considering the nature of the 
man, Carlyle was perfectly satisfied with the 
place. " I have been to see the place," he wrote 
Miss Welsh, " and I like it well so far as I am 
interested in it. There is a good house where 
I may establish myself in comfortable quarters. 
The views from it are superb. There are hard 
smooth roads to gallop on towards any point of 
the compass, and ample space to dig and prune 
under the pure canopy of a wholesome sky. The 
ancient Tower of Repentance stands in a corner 
of the farm, a fit memorial for reflecting sinners." 
This was Carlyle's first impression of the farm ; 
nor did occupancy prove that distance had lent 
enchantment to the view. " We live here on our 
hill-top, enjoying a degree of solitude that might 
content the great Zimmermann himself. Few 
mortals come to visit us, I go to visit none." 
Long years after he could recall the spot with 
feelings of unmixed pleasure. " Hoddam Hill," 
he wrote in his " Reminiscences," " was a neat, 
compact little farm, rent £100, which my father 
had leased for me, on which was a prettyish little 
cottage for dwelling-house ; and from the window 
such a view (fifty miles in radius from beyond 
290 



IN OLD ENGLAND 




Tyndale to beyond St. Bees, Solway Firth, and 
all the fells to Ingleborough inclusive) as Britain 
or the world could hardly have matched." 

At the present time the Carlyle pilgrim has 
considerable difficulty in finding Hoddam Hill, — 
the fact of the philosophers tenancy of that spot 
having faded from ^ j ff ^ v^ 
the local memory. 
All my questions 
were answered 
with stolid nega- 
tives. I must mean 
Mainhill. Even a 
man who had lived 
on the estate all HoDDAM HlLL 

his life was ignorant that Carlyle once rented one 
of its farms. A twofold explanation offers of 
this somewhat surprising fact. Carlyle occupied 
the farm only for a year ; and the local name for 
the house appears to be " The Hill " rather than 
" Hoddam Hill." 

If additional proof were wanted of the indif- 
ference with which Carlyle is regarded in Annan- 
dale, it might be adduced from the deplorable 
condition of the house in which he lived at 
Hoddam Hill. The front door has been blocked 
up, and the building so divided internally that it 
291 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

now provides shelter for two labourers' families. 
When I saw the place it was in a condition 
that would have been disgraceful had the build- 
ing been used as a pig-sty. Mud and dirt 
were plentiful in all directions ; heaps of rubbish 
made walking a gymnastic exercise ; fences were 
broken down and gates lay prostrate ; and un- 
washed and unkempt children looked out from 
the doorways. 

Carlyle may have had some ideas of settling 
down at Hoddam Hill. It was a delightful spot, 
and admirably adapted to the case of a man who 
needed perfect quiet and unlimited fresh air. 
But it was not to be. He was himself, however, 
I believe, to blame for starting the sequence of 
events which led to his removal. It happened in 
this way. Carlyle rode a great deal at Hoddam ; 
and one day the laird's wife, Mrs. Sharpe, was 
walking gently down the hill near Repentance 
Tower, when he passed her on his horse. As 
soon as he got in front of her he put his horse to 
the gallop with such violence that the lady was 
soundly besplashed with mud from head to foot. 
It was after this ungallant incident, as I was in- 
formed, that the laird, General Sharpe, called at 
Hoddam Hill, and Carlyle went to him at the 

door, declining to ask him in. They had a battle 

292 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

royal of words, and the general brought matters 
to a crisis by asking with a sneer, " You, what 
do you know about farming ? " This thunder 
roused the Carlylean lightning. " One thing I 
can do," he shouted, " I can pay the rent ! That 's 
all you have to do with the land, and I '11 feed 
laverocks on it if I like." Then he slammed 
the door in the irate general's face. Carlyle had 
often wanted a door of his own which he might 
" slam in the face of all nauseous intrusions ;" he 
had got it now — and used it. But he was not 
to have it for long. No laird would endure such 
treatment from a tenant ; at any rate, General 
Sharpe was not the man to endure it. And so 
Carlyle had to quit Hoddam Hill and look about 
for a new home. 

During his year at Hoddam Hill, a year which 
abode as " a russet-coated idyl " in his memory 
because of the visit Miss Welsh paid him there, 
Carlyle had two objects in his landscape in which 
he took a deep interest ; and they are of interest 
to us because his eyes rested upon them so often, 
and also because there are so many allusions to 
them in his letters. Chief of these was Repent- 
ance Tower, a solemn-looking building which 
stood near the house, but a little higher up on 
the hill. It is surrounded by a graveyard, and 
293 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

hangs there so spectral amid its memorials of the 
dead that it might furnish food for thought in 
sinners of a less reflecting turn of mind than 
Carlyle. The cause of its erection and the origin 
of its name are thus related : A certain Lord 
Hemes — identified as the champion of Mary 
Queen of Scots — was famous among those who, 
three or four centuries ago, made forays into the 
English border. On one occasion, when return- 
ing with many prisoners, he was overtaken by a 
storm while crossing the Solway ; and in order to 
lighten his boat, he cut all their throats and cast 
them into the sea. Some time after, feeling 
great qualms of conscience, he built this sturdy 
tower, carving over the door the figures of a dove 
and serpent, emblems of remorse and grace, with 
the word " Repentance " between them. The 
other prominent object in Carlyle's landscape was 
Hoddam Kirk, a low-lying and rather picturesque 
building with a curious little tower. In that 
building hung the bell to which he makes a 
pathetic allusion in his reminiscences of life at 
Hoddam Hill. " My thoughts were peaceable, 
full of pity and humanity as they had never been 
before. Nowhere can I recollect of myself such 
pious musings, communings silent and sponta- 
neous with fact and nature, as in those poor An- 
294 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

nandale localities. The sound of the Kirk-bell 
once or twice on Sunday mornings (from Hod- 
dam Kirk, about a mile on the plains below me) 
was strangely touching, like the departing voice 
of eighteen hundred years." 

The abrupt termination of Carlyle's tenancy of 
Hoddam Hill coincided with the expiration of 
his father's lease 
of Mainhill; and 
there had to be 
a double flitting. 
Once more there 
was diligent 
searching through 
the countryside 
for a desirable 
farm — rewarded 

at length by the discovery of Scotsbrig, which was 
to remain the family home for the rest of Carlyle's 
life. Scotsbrig is so closely interwoven with the 
history of his books that his word-pictures of the 
place, both in anticipation and realisation, deserve 
to be added to that provided by the camera. In 
anticipation he wrote to his brother John : — 




Scotsbrig 



" By dint of unbounded higgling, and the most 
consummate diplomacy, the point was achieved 

295 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

to complete satisfaction of the two husbandmen 
[Carlyle's father and Alick] ; and Scotsbrig, free 
of various ' clogs and claims,' which they argued 
away, obtained for a rent of £190 (cheap as they 
reckon it), in the nice of many competitors. . . . 
The people are also to repair the house effectu- 
ally, to floor it anew, put bun-doors on it, new 
windows, and so forth ; and it seems it is ' an 
excellent shell of a house already.' . . . Our 
mother declares that there ' is plenty of both 
peats and water ; ' others think ' the farm is the 
best in Middlebie parishin ; ' our father seems 
to have renewed his youth even as the eagle's 
age." 

Two months later, Carlyle wrote to John 
again, this time in realisation : " We are all got 
over with whole bones to this new country ; and 
every soul of us, our mother to begin with, much 
in love with it. The house is in bad order ; but 
we hope to have it soon repaired ; and for farm- 
ing purposes it is an excellent ' shell of a house.' 
Then we have a linn with crags and bushes, and 
a 'fairy knowe,' though no fairies that I have 
seen yet ; and, cries our mother, abundance of 
grand thready peats, and water from the brook, 
and no reek, and no Honor [that is, General 
296 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Sharpe] to pester us ! To say nothing, cries our 
father, of the eighteen yeacre of the best barley 
in the country ; and bog-hay adds Alick, to fatten 
scores of young beasts ! In fact, making allow- 
ance for new-fangledness, it is a much better 
place, so far as I can judge, than any our people 
have yet been in ; and among a far better and 
kindlier sort of people." 

Such was Scotsbrig in 1826 ; and such it re- 
mains to the present day. Here Carlyle 1 s father 
and mother lived for the remainder of their days ; 
and here his brother James kept the old home 
together until within a few years of his own 
death. Here, too, Carlyle spent the most of his 
holidays ; for even after he became famous, and 
could have passed those holidays in the homes of 
the greatest in the land, he generally elected to 
spend his days of rest among his own kindred, 
in this unpretentious but peaceful home. It is 
well known that Carlyle suffered severely in 
writing his books. Most authors do. No book 
that is worth writing is written without a great 
expenditure of nervous and mental force. George 
Eliot said of " Romola," that she began it a 
young woman, but finished it an old woman. It 
was so with Carlyle. When he had finished a 
book, he felt completely prostrate, and to recover 
297 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

strength and spirit again he generally fled to 
Scotsbrig. What Virgil did for Dante at the 
foot of Purgatory, Scotsbrig did for Carlyle when 
he emerged from the inferno into which his 
books plunged him ; the dews of homely affection 
washed away from his spirit those sombre hues 
which settled so thickly upon him as he wrestled 
with those grim thoughts of the underworld to 
which his genius led him. 

Before visiting the Ecclefechan district, I was 
under the impression that Carlyle's country was 
bleak and bare. Nothing could be farther 
from the truth. Although Mainhill is the least 
attractive of his early homes, the surrounding 
scenery and the view from the farmhouse more 
than compensate for the lack of beauty in its 
immediate environments. Scotsbrig is as pictur- 
esque a retreat as the most impassioned lover of 
nature could desire ; and the road thither from 
Ecclefechan leads the pilgrim alluringly onward 
between luxurious hedgerows and flower-covered 
banks. Hoddam Hill, as we have seen, greatly 
pleased even Carlyle ; and there could be no 
more eloquent testimony in its favour. Set 
on the summit of a hill, amid richly wooded 
scenery, it commands a view of verdant country 
unrivalled in any part of the British Isles. First 

298 




The " Kind Beech Rows of Ecclefechan " 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the eye sweeps over a rich belt of land to the 
shores of the Solway, then, crossing its waters, 
rests upon the plains of Cumberland, and finally 
reaches the limit of vision among the mountains 
of Wordsworth's country. 

The roads leading from Ecclefechan toward 
Hoddam Hill are even more beautiful than 
those which point the way to Scotsbrig. When, 
in " Sartor Resartus," Carlyle describes the feel- 
ings which took possession of his spirit as he 
entered Annan for the first time to attend school 
there, it seemed to him an added source of sor- 
row that the " kind beech rows of Entepfuhl 
[that is, Ecclefechan] were hidden in the distance." 
He had passed between those beech rows on that 
memorable Whitsuntide walk ; and blinded in- 
deed would the eyes be of a man or youth who 
could walk through such avenues with indiffer- 
ence. These scenes were not lost on Carlyle. 
Annandale has had its influence on his most 
characteristic book ; for no man can appreciate 
the essential poetry of " Sartor Resartus " until 
he has visited the Ecclefechan district. There is 
an inexplicable charm about that countryside, 
which Carlyle has caught and perpetuated in his 
pages, a charm which is totally independent of the 
strain of thought running through the volume. 

301 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

As is too common in Scotland, a poor mini- 
mum of care seems to be bestowed upon the 
God's acre where Carlyle and his kindred lie 
quiet in death. Surrounded by a rude and bare 
stone wall, entered through an unlovely iron 
gate, the graves in general speak eloquently of 
the forgetfulness of human sorrow. 

" Headstone and half-sunk footstone lean awry, 
Wanting the brick-work promised by and by ; 
How the minute gray lichens, plate o'er plate, 
Have softened down the crisp-cut name and date ! " 

The Carlyle grave is an exception to this rule. 
Inside the high iron railing that surrounds it, 
perpetuating the Carlyle aloofness even in death, 
the grass is closely cut ; and daisies are the only 
weeds allowed to grow there. There are three 
graves within the enclosure, Carlyle being buried 
in the centre. In the grave to the left sleep his 
father and mother, and two of his sisters ; also 
his father's wife by his first marriage. The final 
sentence of the inscription was written by Car- 

lyle. 

" Erected to the 
Memory of Jannet Carlyle, 
Spouse to James Carlyle, mas- 
on in Ecclefechan, who died 
the 11th Septr 1792 in the 25th 
year of her age. 
302 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Also Jannet Carlyle, daughter to 

James Carlyle and Margaret Aitken. 

She died at Ecclefechan Jan. 27th, 1801 ; 

aged 17 months. Also Margaret 

their daughter, she died June 22nd 1830 

aged 27 years — And the above 

James Carlyle, born at Brownknowe 

in Augt. 1758, died at Scotsbrig on the 

23rd Jany 1832, and now also rests here. 

And here also now rests the above 

Margaret Aitken, his second wife. Born at 

Whitestanes, Kirkmahoe, in 

Septr. 1771 ; died at Scotsbrig, 

On Christmas day 1853. She brought 

him nine children ; whereof four 

sons and three daughters survived 

gratefully reverent of such 

a Father, and such a Mother." 

Carlyle's reminiscences of his father and the 
reflections which he penned in his journal on his 
mother's death prove what a wealth of affection 
he bore toward his parents. Mr. Froude testi- 
fies : " The strongest personal passion which he 
experienced through all his life was his affection 
for his mother." " Mother," he said to her when 
he removed to London, " Mother, you shall see 
me once yearly, and regularly hear from me, while 
we live." He kept his promise ; and even when 
death claimed his mother for his own he never 
visited Ecclefechan without going to her grave. 
A native of the village told me that, going late 
one summer evening into the churchyard, he 

303 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

saw an aged man lying prostrate on Margaret 
Aitken's grave. It was Thomas Carlyle. 

The grave to the right is that of Carlyle's 
brother James, of whom many characteristic 
and Carlylean stories were told me. To a cer- 
tain extent he appears to have shared the old 
roadman's opinions of his famous brother's work, 
or at least to have been indifferent to immortal 
achievements in the realm of literature. He 
was met one day in the village by a party of 
American pilgrims, who, ignorant of his identity, 
asked of him the whereabouts of Carlyle's grave. 
" Which Carlyle ? " " Oh, the great Carlyle, 
Thomas Carlyle." With unmoved face he gave 
the information asked, and was rewarded with a 
fine outburst of hero-worship. " We have come 
all the way from America," said the spokesman 
of the pilgrims, "to lay this wreath on our great 
teacher's grave." " Ha ! " rejoined he, still un- 
moved, " it 's a gey harmless occupation ! " Again, 
at some meeting of the farmers in the district, 
the rent day probably, a dinner was given, and 
some long-winded yeoman said grace before the 
meal. Jamie listened through it patiently, then 
saluted his over-unctuous neighbour with the re- 
mark, " A vera guid blessing, Wullie, but ye 've 
spoilt the soup." 

304 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

No lies are told on Carlyle's tombstone. The 
inscription is simple and laconic. The family 




Carlyle's Grave 



crest, two wyverns, the family motto, Humilitate, 
and then these words : — 

20 305 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" Here rests Thomas Carlyle, who was born at Ecclefechan, 
4th December, 1795, and died at 24 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, 
London, on Saturday, 5th February, 1881." 

That is all ; and yet it is enough. There are two 
significant, pregnant words, Humilitate, Rests. 
To the student of Carlyle they will preach deeper 
meanings than a Johnsonian epitaph. Whether 
the result of choice or accident, there is a singular 
appropriateness in John Carlyle sharing the grave 
of his illustrious brother. They had common 
aims in life ; they will both live in literature, and 
in their death they are not divided. 

In his reminiscences of his father, and in the 
rough notes he made of family history, Carlyle 
is at great pains to forestall any unfavourable 
criticism of his kindred. In such Annandale 
quarrels as the Carlyles mingled, they were 
not, he says, aggressive ; their contentions were 
only " manful assertions of man's rights against 
men that would infringe them." But there is a 
difference between family history written sub- 
jectively and the same history written objec- 
tively. For example, when the Carlyles were 
at work upon some building they occasionally 
diverted themselves by splashing wet lime upon 
a hapless passer-by ; and if he threatened repri- 
sals they coolly warned him that " he needna 

306 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

try, for it wasna ane o' them he would hae to 
fash, but the hail lot o' them ! " Several such 
instances are authenticated, and the Carlyles are 
said to have paid special attentions of this sort 
to any pedestrian who had the misfortune to be 
better dressed than themselves. Mr. Froude, 
who was charitable, wrote me that he never heard 
this story, and that if true, there must be another 
side to it. " They were a proud race," he added, 
" too proud to go into paltry impertinences ; but 
I can believe that in other ways they may have 
given endless offence." 

There are many magnets which attract the 
literary pilgrim to Chelsea. In St. Luke's rec- 
tory Charles Kingsley spent several years of his 
boyhood ; a cottage in Cheyne Walk witnessed 
the gloomy sunset of Turner's life ; Upper Cheyne 
Row provided a home for a time for the thriftless 
household of Leigh Hunt ; and two of the stately 
houses which front the river Thames are linked 
with the lives of Rossetti and George Eliot. 
But it is in no disparagement of these other im- 
mortals that the shrine which is first sought is 
No. 24 Cheyne Row. 

Once Carlyle settled down in London he did 
not flit from house to house as so many other 
famous writers have done. Perhaps that was 

307 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



owing partly to the care he expended in search- 
ing for a suitable home. He travelled many 
miles on that search ; walked hither and thither 
until his feet were lamed under him. At length 

his good fortune 
led him to Chelsea, 
and the house he 
chose there shel- 
tered him for the 
rest of his days. 
"We lie safe at a 
bend of the river," 
he wrote to his 
anxious mother, 
"away from all the 
great roads, have 
air and quiet 
hardly inferior to 
Craigenputtoch, an 
outlook from the 
back windows into mere leafy regions, with here 
and there a red high-peaked old roof looking 
through ; and see nothing of London, except by 
day the summits of St. Paul's Cathedral and 
Westminster Abbey, and by night the gleam of 
the great Babylon affronting the peaceful skies." 
When Carlyle took possession of the house in 

308 




Carlyle 



Home 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Cheyne Row it consisted of three floors and a 
half-sunk basement, and the rent he paid was 
but £35 ! Some years ago it was announced as 
" To Let," and whoso inquired the rent found 
that the figure had risen to £90. But now not 
even £90 a year could secure it, for the building 
has properly passed into the possession of the 
Nation, and will be carefully preserved to receive 
the homage of generations yet unborn. It is full 
of Carlyle relics, but to the seeing eye it is even 
more peopled with the shades of those sons and 
daughters of fame who have gathered within 
its walls. 

Here, as in Scotland, where no adequate me- 
morial of Carlyle is to be found, the wise disciple 
of such a teacher comforts himself with these 
words : " For giving his soul to the common 
cause, he has won for himself a wreath which 
will not fade and a tomb the most honorable, 
not where his dust is decaying, but where his 
glory lives in everlasting remembrance. For of 
illustrious men all the earth is the sepulchre, and 
it is not the inscribed column in their own land 
which is the record of their virtues, but the un- 
written memory of them in the hearts and minds 
of all mankind." 



e 



THOMAS HOOD'S 
HOMES AND FRIENDS 



X 

THOMAS HOOD'S HOMES AND FRIENDS 

" Jealous, I own it, I was once — 
That wickedness I here renounce. 
I tried at wit — it would not do ; 
At tenderness — that failed me too. 
Before me on each path there stood 
The nitty and the tender Hood ! " 

Walter Savage Landor. 

Humour and Pathos linked their hands across 
the cradle of Thomas Hood to vow him for their 
own. And he was theirs till death. Over the 
events of his life, or the creations of his brain, 
that joint possession never slackened its hold for 
an hour. If, to visible seeming, Pathos holds 
supremacy to-day in the suffering of the poet's 
body, Humour claims the guidance of his muse ; if 
to-morrow Humour should irradiate his outward 
life with laughter, we may be sure that Pathos 
will cast its shadow within. Tears and laughter 
are never far apart in that strangely mingled life. 
Behind the smile there is a thinly veiled sadness ; 
through the tears there comes a gleam of mirth. 
313 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 



It was a dual life he lived, an April day of shine 
and shadow. 

Hood once paid a visit to Ham House, which 
nestles so picturesquely among stately elms at 

the foot of Rich- 
mond Hill, and 
within a stone's 
throw of the " sil- 
ver streaming 
Thames." It was 
summer-time, and 
the historic man- 
sion and its famous 
avenue looked 
their best. But 
that visit was re- 
sponsible for the 
creation of " The 
Elm-Tree." Hood 
saw nothing of the 
bright sunshine, 
heard nothing of the songs of birds, or rather, he 
saw and heard them, and saw and heard beyond 
them. As he wandered down those avenues of 
loftly elms he caught no bird melody, but a " sad 
and solemn sound " filled his ears, which seemed 
now to murmur amid the leaves over his head, 

314 




Elm-tree Avenue, Ham House 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

and anon to rise from the greensward beneath 
his feet. It was not the wind sighing amid the 
branches, nor the squirrel rustling the leaves in 
its happy gambols from bough to bough, nor any 
Dryad making the forest voluble as in the olden 
time : — 

" But still the sound was in my ear, 
A sad and solemn sound, 
That sometimes murmured overhead, 
And sometimes underground." 

As the poet heard not the birds so he saw not 
the sunshine, but in the stead of golden shafts of 
light in that shady avenue, his eyes caught a 
glimpse of the Spectre of Death, standing by 
a sturdy elm fresh felled by the woodman's axe. 
And he heard death speak, and he knew then the 
cause of the mysterious murmur : — 

" This massy trunk that lies along, 

And many more must fall — 

For the very knave 

Who digs the grave, 

The man who spreads the pall, 

And he who tolls the funeral hell, 

The Elm shall have them all ! " 

Where other eyes had seen an elm tree, verdant 
with vigorous life, the haven of birds, the play- 
ground of squirrels, Hood had seen — a coffin ! 

315 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Has any other poet so pierced through the smil- 
ing mask of nature to the symbol of human 
sadness hidden behind ? 

Again, when life was nearing its close and his 
body was wasted with disease and racked with 
pain, the poet paused from his work one day to 
write letters to the three children of his devoted 
physician, Dr. Elliot, who were spending a holiday 
by the sea. There are no more delightful letters 
to children in English literature. Hood knew 
the measure of the child-mind to a fraction, and 
had full command of the reasoned nonsense which 
Lewis Carroll has made so popular since. But 
mingling with the boisterous fun of these de- 
lightful letters there are gentle sighs of sadness, 
all too gentle, one is happy to think, to have been 
detected by the bright young spirits to whom 
the letters were addressed. What child could 
catch the undercurrent of pathos in such sentences 
as these : — 

" I wish there were such nice green hills here as 
there are at Sandgate. They must be very nice to 
roll down, especially if there are no furze-bushes 
to prickle one, at the bottom ! Do you remember 
how the thorns stuck in us like a penn'orth of 
mixed pins, at Wanstead ? I have been very ill, 
316 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

and am so thin now I could stick myself into a 
prickle. My legs, in particular, are so wasted 
away that somebody says my pins are only 
needles ; and I am so weak I dare say you could 
push me down on the floor and right through the 
carpet, unless it was a strong pattern. I am sure 
if I were at Sandgate you could carry me to the 
post-office and fetch my letters. . . . 

" There are no flowers, I suppose, on the beach, 
or I would ask you to bring me a bouquet, as 
you used at Stratford. But there are little crabs ! 
If you would catch one for me, and teach it to 
dance the Polka, it would make me quite happy ; 
for I have not had any toys or playthings for a 
long time." 

Humour and Pathos, too, mingle themselves in 
one of the latest sketches Hood drew for his own 
magazine. Prevented by a severe illness from 
keeping faith with his readers, he ventured to 
express his regrets by the pencil instead of the 
pen, and in his sick-bed drawing the title of his 
magazine is symbolised by a magpie wearing a 
hood, while the "Editor's Apologies" comprise 
a significant group of medicine bottles, a dish 
of leeches, and the picture of a heart with a line 
encircling it — typical of the enlarged heart from 

317 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

which he was dying. Thus, to the end, Hood 
was faithful to his own creed : — 

" There is no music in the life 

That sounds with idiot laughter solely ; 
There 's not a string attuned to mirth, 
But has its chord in melancholy." 

On the poet's monument, in Kensal Green 
Cemetery, the date of his birth is given as 23d 
May, 1798, but in several biographies that event 
is stated to have taken place a year later. His 
own children appear to have been doubtful on 
this point, for his daughter, in her " Memorials," 
gives the later year on no surer authority than 
"as far as we trace." Henceforth, however, the 
exact date of Hood's birth need be no longer a 
matter of uncertainty, for here is a verbatim copy 
of his natal certificate : — 

" These are to certify, that Thomas Hood, son 
of Thomas Hood and Elizabeth Hood his wife, 
who was Daughter of James Sands, was Born in 
the Poultry, in the parish of St. Mildred, in the 
City of London, the Twenty-third Day of May, 
in the Year One thousand Seven hundred and 
Ninety-nine, at whose Birth we were present. 

"Ruth Sands. 

"Jane Curlee. 

318 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" Registered at Dr. William's Library, Red- 
cross-street, near Cripplegate, London. 

" Thomas Morgan, Registrar. 
"Nov. 27th, 1817." 



iF -No. .909 

HHHESE are to certify, That, ffiu^^^r &£*&#$ 

j^^i^^e^-^|j>/^.hi s Wife, who was iWgfcter ''of 
?ry^ >vx ^- '"?"**&< was Born in tetu'tfkUtft, 

in the Parish of, \^cxj^cir^:^£^- 
in the C *sCn , ' , of ^-cr-r^a-^ > jjj e % A>< ji^yi 
£&?~#C Day of 'c/t'icc<+ .in the Year o-s^*-* $%~*-4^%#tgL> 



yet*;*-- vLU*f&4^A*& at whose Birth .we" w^ pre«^?* ^ 



^^^ ZJ&Wf Q%rt My*4e Registrar. ^ 

Rjth the above should be signed by two or more Persons,: who were present at the Birth ; - 
id, if such Witnesses cannot write, their Marks should-be attested by two credible Person*, 
'he Dale of the Birth should; be in Words at J>ngth, and not in Figures, j 
N. B. Attendance at, the Library every "Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, ] 
between the Honrj of Ten in the Morning and Three in the Afternoon ; except during the • 
Month of August,- and the Whitsun and Christmas Weeks, when the Library is »hut up. 

, . ' fiuMd If 5. Coatkat*, Thto»mino»Jt(««t, Least*. .2 

JLi Jl: _ k__ i ^.'.-l..- *..--._ _• J 



The original of this interesting document was 
in the possession of the late Mr. Towneley Green, 
R. I., whose mother was a sister of Thomas 
Hood's wife. It is to the same eminent artist's 
kindness that I am indebted for permission to 
use those extracts from some unpublished letters 
319 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of Hood, which will be found below. What 
other valuable services Mr. Towneley Green ren- 
dered me in the preparation of these pages will 
make themselves manifest from time to time. 
To return to the birth certificate for a moment. 
It will be seen that this document makes known, 
for the first time, the Christian name of Hood's 
maternal grandfather (hitherto his mother has 
been spoken of as the " sister of Mr. Robert 
Sands ") ; that it definitely locates the Poultry 
as the place of his birth ; that one of his aunts 
was present at his entrance to the world ; and 
finally, that the registration was effected more 
than eighteen years after the birth took place. 
With regard to the second fact, it is interesting 
to know that the building now known as No. 31, 
Poultry, stands upon the same site as that in 
which the poet was born over a century ago. It 
is, of course, impossible to explain the protracted 
delay in the registration of the birth, or why, 
after eighteen years, it should have been regis- 
tered at all. But a guess may be hazarded. 
Hood was apprenticed to his uncle, Robert 
Sands, the engraver, and it may be that the regis- 
tration of his birth is connected with that event. 
Thomas Hood attained his majority without 
achieving any definite connection with literature, 

320 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

but his son ought not to have lent his authority 
to the assertion that prior to 1821 his father 
"had displayed no strong literary tendencies." 
During his visit to Dundee, in search of health, 
which lasted, there are sound reasons for believ- 
ing, from December, 1814, to some time in 1817, 
he had written a large quantity of verse, and his 
connection on his return to London, with the 
" private select Literary Society," of the " Rem- 
iniscences;' kept him busy with his pen. In short, 
Hood did not enter the world of letters until 
after he had served a long apprenticeship to the 
pen. This is made clear by a letter (unknown to 
his daughter when she compiled the "Memo- 
rials ") he wrote in 1820 to a Scottish correspond- 
ent, who had written to offer profuse apologies 
for having lost the manuscript of Hood's rhymed 
"Dundee Guide." 

" I will tell you a secret for your comfort, that 
the loss, if even great, would not be irreparable, 
for I could, if necessary, write afresh from memory 
and nearly verbatim. It is the same with nearly 
all the rest of my effusions, some of which I shall 
hereafter send for your perusal, to show you that 
I do not consider you the ' careless friend ' you 
represent yourself to be. I continue to receive 



21 



321 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

much pleasure from our literary society, and 
from my own pursuits in that way, in which, 
considering my little time, I am very industrious ; 
that is to say, I spoil a deal of paper. My last 
is a mock heroic love-tale of 600 lines, with notes 
critical and explanatory, which I lately finished 
after many intervals, independent of two poetical 
addresses to the society on closing and opening 
a fresh session, with various pieces, chiefly ama- 
tory. . . . 

" I find I shall not be able to send my poems 
to you for some time, as they are in the hands of 
an intelligent bookseller, a friend of mine, who 
wishes to look them over. He says that they 
are worth publishing, but I doubt very much if 
he would give me any proof of his opinion, or 1 
should indulge in the hope of sending them to 
you in a more durable shape." 

These passages prove, beyond question, that 
when, on the tragic death of John Scott, in 
1821, the "London Magazine" became the prop- 
erty of Messrs. Taylor and Hessey, and those 
gentlemen enlisted the services of Thomas Hood 
as sub-editor of its pages, the young engraver was 
amply qualified to throw aside his etching-tools 
in favour of the pen. At first his duties appear 

322 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

to have been little more than those of a superior 
proof-reader, but ere long he began inventing 
facetious " Answers to Correspondents," and in a 
short time he took an established place among 
the contributors to the magazine. It was a fa- 
mous circle into which he thus gained admittance, 
and in Taylor's dining-room, at 93, Fleet Street, 
with its windows overlooking St. Bride's Church- 
yard, Hood often shared in such merriment as 
could only have been created in gatherings which 
included such spirits as Elia, Allan Cunningham, 
Barry Cornwall, Horace Smith, John Clare, and 
John Hamilton Reynolds. With two of that 
illustrious band, Hood was destined to enjoy an 
affectionate history. The gentle Elia quickly 
appealed to his heart, and the depth of his feel- 
ing for him may be inferred from the fact that 
of the two portraits which accompanied Hood 
in all his wanderings and changes, one was that 
of Charles Lamb. The other member of the 
" London Magazine " circle to enter into close 
companionship with Hood was John Hamilton 
Reynolds. It was no doubt profitable for Hood 
to enter into such relationship with Reynolds, 
apart from the fact that the friendship culminated 
in his marriage with his sister, Jane Reynolds. 
Keats himself was often indebted to the fine lit- 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

erary instinct of John Hamilton Reynolds, and 
it is highly probable that Hood also reaped ma- 
terial advantage in the same direction. Keats 
and Reynolds contemplated collaboration in a 
volume of poems ; Hood and Reynolds carried 
such a scheme to fruition. Hence the volume 
of " Odes and Addresses to Great People," which 
Coleridge so confidently attributed to Lamb, and 
of which, while still in the making, Hood wrote 
to Reynolds : " I think the thing is likely to be 
a hit, but if you do some I shall expect it to 
run like wild-fire." 

Unhappily, this promising friendship did not 
survive till that final severance which ends all 
friendships. The two quarrelled, but why they 
quarrelled will never be known. Neither of the 
children of Hood nor his other close relatives 
knew how the estrangement came about. Nor is 
it known when the rupture took place ; all that is 
certain is that it was subsequent to Hood's mar- 
riage with Jane Reynolds, and also subsequent 
to John Hamilton Reynolds's own marriage with 
Miss Drew. That the latter was the case is 
proved by a document in Hood's writing among 
the unpublished papers of Mr. Towneley Green. 
This is a humorous account of Reynolds's wed- 
ding, drawn up in the form of a State procession, 

324 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

and it provides another illustration of the lively 
spirit with which Hood was wont to celebrate 
all important family occasions. Here it is : 

A Progress from London to Wedlock through Exeter 

PEOPLE OF EXETER WITH BANNERS 
GLOVERS 
HONOURABLE COMPANY OF MATCH MAKERS 
BANNER 
BEADLE WITH HIS BANNER 
HYMEN AND AMEN WITH THEIR BANNERS 
1ST, 2ND, AND 3RD TIMES OF ASKING WITH THEIR AXES 
PAGE BEARING THE MATRIMONIAL YOKE WITH THE MILK OF HUMAN 
KINDNESS 
THE HAPPY PAIR! 
BANNERS, MUTUAL BENEFIT, HAND-IN-HAND, AND UNION, WITH THE 
SWEET LITTLE CHERUB THAT SITS UP ALOFT 
DOMESTIC HABITS IN LIVERY, ATTENDED BY DOMESTIC COMFORT 
BANNER 
CARMEN NUPTIALE 
CUPID WITH THE RING 
EDITOR WITH HIS STAFF 
MESSRS. TAYLOR AND HESSEY, ALLAN CUNNINGHAM, RICHARD WOOD- 
HOUSE, THEODORE, W. HAZLITT, H. CARY, C. VINKBOOMS, JAMES 
WEATHERCOCK, THOS. DE QUINCEY, W. HILTON, C. LAMB AS DIDDLE 
DIDDLE DUMPKINS WITH ONE SHOE OFF AND ONE SHOE ON, AND HIS 
MAN, JOHN CLARE; J. RICE, W. PROCTOR, MR. RILEY-PARKER. THE 
LAMB FLAGS CARRIED BY MR. MONTGOMERY 
LION'S HEAD WITH HIS TWO PAGES 
PLACARD " THE HEAD OF THE FAMILY " 
MR. AND MRS. REYNOLDS AND MRS. BUTLER 
TRAIN BEARERS 
CUPIDS IN LIVERY 

325 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

BANNER: THE FAMILY CREST 

THE THREE MISS REYNOLDS 

TRAINBEARERS 

BANNER: CUPID WITH A WHITE BOW 

THREE GENTLEMEN AFTER THE THREE MISS REYNOLDS 

PLACARD : " THE BRIDE'S CHARACTER " 

FRIENDS: MUSICIANS: A BLIND BARD, HARPING ON ONE STRING 

WIND INSTRUMENTS, " PIPING TO THE SPIRIT DITTIES OF NO TONE," 

ETC., ETC. 

BANNER 

THE PEOPLE OF EXETER 

It was, of course, in the family home of his 
friend Reynolds that Hood met his future wife, 
Jane Reynolds. The family lived in Little 
Britain in one of the " Master's houses," as those 
buildings were called which were devoted to the 
use of the tutors of Christ's Hospital near by. 
The father was Writing and Mathematical Mas- 
ter in that famous school, and he and his wife 
and children were evidently friends and abettors 
of all those who found their chief pleasure in 
literature ; Keats and Lamb were frequent visi- 
tors, and many lesser lights in the early nine- 
teenth-century world of letters were often found 
under that congenial roof in Little Britain. 
Mrs. Reynolds herself was possessed of fine lit- 
erary instincts, and in 1827 she published, under 
the pen-name of " Mrs. Hamerton " a delightful 
little tale bearing the title of "Mrs. Leslie and 

326 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

her Grandchildren." A copy of this rare volume 
was in the library of Mr. Towneley Green, and 
on its half-title page there is pasted a brief 
extract of a letter from Lamb to Hood. The 
extract reads thus : — 

" Dear H. — Emma has a favour, besides a 
bed, to ask of Mrs. Hood. Your parcel was 
gratifying. We have all been pleased with Mrs. 
Leslie: I speak it most sincerely. There is 
much manly sense with a feminine expression, 
which is my definition of ladies' writing." 

Hood's wooing of Jane Reynolds appears to 
have met with some opposition from within the 
Little Britain family circle, but the young poet 
evidently had a zealous advocate in the person of 
his betrothed's mother. The following hitherto 
unpublished letter from Hood to Mrs. Reynolds 
witnesses to a warm spirit of affection between 
the two. The date of the letter is uncertain. 



" Lower Street 
" Islington. 

" My Dearest Mother, — I was to have 
written to you yesterday evening, but my hand 
was so tired with transcribing all the morning that 

327 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

I was obliged unwillingly to let it rest. I do not 
know how I am to put interest enough in these 
lines to repay you for the long time I have been 
indebted for your kind ones ; I know they were 
written designedly to put me in heart and hope, 
and indeed they were more than a pleasure to 
me in the midst of pain. They were not only 
kind, but enlivened with such smart and humor- 
ous conceits as might account for some part of 
my difficulty in finding a reply. You know I am 
not used to flatter ; and if 1 were to begin now, 
Heaven help me, but you should be the last 
woman for my experiment. I know you have 
a ' smashing blow ' for such butter-moulds. 

" I am a great deal better. My hands are 
now returned to their natural size. From their 
plumpness before with the little nourishment I 
took, and their afterwards falling away, you 
would have thought I sustained myself like the 
bears, by sucking my paws. I am now on a 
stouter diet, a Beef-eater, and devour my ox by 
instalments ; so provide yourself against I come. 
I have nursed a hope of seeing you on Sunday. 
It has been one of the greatest privations of my 
illness to be debarred from a presence so kind as 
yours ; but I trust, weak as I am, to make my 
bow at your next drawing-room. You know 

328 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

there is a hope for everything ; your old rose- 
tree has a bud on it. 

" I wish you could patronise my garden, you 
should walk about it like Aurora, and bedew the 
young plants. It is quite green, and the flowers 
that were sown, are now seed coming up from 
the ground. I am just going there as soon as 
I have achieved this letter. The fresh air feeds 
me like a chameleon, and makes me change the 
colour of my skin too. I shall need all my 
strength if you expect me to come and romp 
with your grandchild. My dear Jane writes 
that owing to Mr. Acland's delay, it is likely 
that they may not come up till the week after 
next. Pray make use of the interval in double- 
bracing your nerves against the tumults of ' the 
little sensible Longmore.' She will put you to 
your Hop-Tea. I expect she will quite revo- 
lutionise Little Britain. The awful brow of 
Mariane, the muscular powers of Lottie, the 
serious remonstrances of Aunt Jane, the ma- 
ternal and grand-maternal authorities will be set 
at nought with impunity. As for Green and I, 
we shall come up empty about dinner-time, and in 
the hubbub, be sent empty away. The old china 
will be cracked like mad ; the tour-terelles, finger- 
blotted and spoiled; the chintz, — now coulcur 

329 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

de rose — all rumpled and unflounced ! You will 
get some rest never ! 

" I had a note from that unfortunate youth 
Haley, on Sunday. It commenced : ' Saturated 
with rain,' as if to show me the use he had made 
of my dictionary ; and ended by begging a trifle 
to help him into the 99th. 1 played the ser- 
geant's part and gave him a shilling, not from 
any bounty of my own, but because all the girls 
cried out upon me for their parts. ' They could 
not resist such entreaties.' However, do not 
blame me, for I mean to cut him off with it, and 
be deaf to his letters in the future. 

" I have been obliged to avail myself of the 
sunshine, and wish I could send you some by 
this letter, to sit in your thoughts. I hope you 
dwell only on the pleasant ones ; for, with all 
your cares, you must have many such. Think 
of your good and clever daughters, who paint 
sea nymphs, and sing, and play on the piano ; 
and of your son John, dear to the Muses. I 
think few families have been dealt with so 
well, if, indeed, any. There 's Jane, and Eliza, 
Mariane, and Lottie, — four Queens ; and John, 
— you must count ' two for his nob.' I was glad 
to hear that he came to you, and in such excel- 
lent tune and highly pleased with his praise of 

330 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

my Poem. It was worth the commendations of 
all a ' London Magazine ' to me ; with its Editor 
at the head, or, if you please, at the tail. Pray 
tell Mariane that 1 have written a long, serious, 
Spanish story, trying not to be more idle than I 
can help, which, as soon as it is transcribed, I shall 
send to her. I have almost written some songs 
for Lottie, but want rhymes to them. I have 
never been allowed yet to sigh to your ' Willow 
Song ' for the Album. Lambkins and Willows 
were indispensable to the old songs, but I thought 
such fleecy-osiery poetry went out with Pope. 
I almost think it a shame amongst all my rhym- 
ing that I have never yet mused upon you ; but 
please God, you and 1 mend, you shall adorn a 
sonnet yet, and if it be worthy of you, I shall 
think myself some * Boet,' as Handel used to call 
it. I might have a much worse subject and in- 
spiration than the recollection of your goodness, 
and with that happy remembrance 1 will leave 
off. God bless you, my dearest Mother ! You 
say you wonder how it is I respect and esteem 
you as such, as if I had not read in you a kind- 
ness towards me, which in such a heart as yours 
must always outrun its means ; nay, as if in 
thinking me worthy of one of your excellent 
daughters, you have not in all the love and duty 

331 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of a son made me bounden to you for ever. Per- 
haps after this you will bear with my earnest 
looks in knowing that they are attracted to you 
by a gratitude and affection which could never 
enough thank and bless you, if they did not do 
so sometimes silently and in secret. 

" Pray distribute my kindest love amongst all, 
and believe it my greatest happiness to join with 
your own in all duty, honour, and affection as 

your son. 

" T. Hood." 

It will be evident from the above letter that 
by the time it was written, Hood had become 
perfectly at home in the house at Little Britain. 
Indeed, his relations with all the members of the 
family were of a characteristically affectionate 
nature. As may be inferred from the letter just 
quoted, one of the sisters, Eliza, was already mar- 
ried to Mr. Longmore ; Jane was married to 
Hood ; Mariane was to wed the Mr. Green who 
was to share Hood's mealless fate through the 
" hubbub " over the advent of the Longmore 
grandchild ; and Charlotte, the subject of Hood's 
" Number One," was fated to die single. If the 
poet had a favourite among his three sisters-in- 
law, Mariane was undoubtedly she. One of his 

332 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

letters to her will make that predilection abun- 
dantly clear. It should be premised that when it 
was written Mariane Reynolds was on a visit to 
her sister, Mrs. Longmore, at Chelmsford, Essex. 

" Lower Street, Islington. 

" My very dear Mariaxe, — Such kind 
messages as yours are irresistible, and I must 
write again if only to show you that I feel more 
than repaid for my last letter. I know that you 
do not like to correspond yourself, but it shall be 
enough for me, dear, if I may believe that 1 am 
not quite the last person you would write to. 
Indeed 1 know that I should not, if I could, 
imagine how very much I am pleased with 
whatever you say or do ; which is far too much 
to let me become the graceless and ungrateful 
critic. But I know that you do not wrong me 
by any such fear, and, therefore, till you write to 
others, and not to me, I shall consider that my 
letters are answered by the pleasure they may 
give you. I am sure they are not without 
delight to myself, and still more when I learn 
that you are to keep them ; for I know whatever 
kindnesses they may contain, that they will never 
be belied by time. I might even crowd them 
with more affection, and still be justified, for I 

333 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

have a thousand reasons for loving you, if you 
were not my dear Jane's sister, which is a thou- 
sand reasons in one. But I can afford to waive 
that for your own sake, tho' when I remember 
that I might have had a Drew instead, I cannot 
feel too happy, too proud, or too fond of you in 
that relation. I wish I could but give you a 
tenth part of such causes to make me dear to 
you ; however it is some merit to love you, and 
you must give me the benefit of that considera- 
tion. Therefore, dear, do store up these letters, 
and if, hereafter, you should lack a true wight to 
do you suit or service, let them remind you of 
the hand and heart of a Brother. Would he 
were as potent, as proud of this title, for yours 
and others' dear sake ; but it is not the fault of 
my wish that I cannot make you Queen of the 
Amaranths, or pluck a bow of green leaves and 
turn them into emeralds for your casket. 

" There is a tale of a little prince who had a 
ruby heart, and whatever he wished on it was 
instantly granted ; but it is not so with mine. 
Neither have I Aladdin's Lamp, or it should 
have been scrubbed bright ere the Chelmsford 
Ball. But now it is a dark Lanthorn, and the 
glory of fairyland is bedimmed for ever. Only 
the fiery dragons remain, which be cares many 

334 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

and fearful ; and the black cats, and the demons 
and imps and the ogres, who are the Booksellers, 
except that they have no eye in their foreheads. 
But I am not writing King Obern's Elegy ; so 
away with this lament for the little people, and 
let 's think of the living ! 

"The interesting little Miss Kindred has 
enquired after you, and you have been missed 
at Le Mercier's. We met the former at Mr. 
Butler's last night, and she seemed what the 
world would call a sweet girl, full of sensibility 
and commerce. Her sister, I should think, has a 
smack of Prudence Morton. I like her best, for 
she was absent. Jane has made a very pleasant 
addition to her friendships, by her introduction 
at another party (Le Mercier's) to a Mrs. Simp- 
son and a Mrs. Cockle. I quite wish you had 
the former at Chelmsford. There was a Mr. 
Capper, too, with a facsimile of Woodhouse's 
profile, as if such a one was worthy of two 
editions ; and 1 wish you could have seen him 
too. You should have him in for nothing, in 
exchange, with all the others, against Green, 
when it shall please you to export him. The 
ladies of Chelmsford might grow their own. 
They have had time enough to shred him like 
Angelica. No doubt he hath often gone, pur- 

335 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

posely, to the coach, when it was too late, like 
dear Miss Longmore, 

" ' Farewell so often goes before 't is gone ! ' 

He has been so long expected here that we are 
afraid he is coming by a hearse. Tell him, the 
house of Blackheath has been robbed, and his 
little nephews Wielanded. Only think that 
Butler likes ' St. Ronan's Well,' and does not 
dote on old Im — no, ' Old Mortality ' ! Have 
you any bluestockings at Chelmsford ? Tell 
them that you know a gentleman that knows a 
friend of Barry Cornwall. We are plotting here 
to go to the play when it shall be worth seeing, 
but do not let that hasten you. If you stay a 
week longer you shall have another letter, and a 
better. Now, I am rather hurried, and must 
put in an appearance before Mr. Hessey. So 
God bless you, dear, tho', I say that deliber- 
ately, accept my sincere love and kind wishes, 
and believe me, for ever, 

" Your affectionate Brother, 
"T. Hood. 

" P. S. for Miss Longmore, — London is very 
dull and foggy, and the baked codlins very dear. 
Pray wear list shoes this nasty, slidy weather, 
336 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

and keep your feet warm; there's nothing like 
that. I have got a sprained ankle, but do not 
let that grieve you. Some people like a well- 
turn 'd one, but I don't. It gives me a great deal 
of pain, but I must say good-bye, good-bye, 
good-bye, go — goo — good, by — by — bye." 

Notwithstanding the opposition to his suit, 
Hood, in due time, reaped the reward of his sin- 
cere affection for Jane Reynolds. There were 
dark days in store for these two, days of unceas- 
ing buffeting with adverse fortune, made all the 
more trying by persistent ill health, but their 
devotion and affection never faltered for a single 
moment. Through good report and ill, Jane 
Hood was a true and faithful wife, the inspiration 
of some of her husband's best work, and his ever- 
ready helper in preparing his manuscripts for the 
printers. On his part, too, Thomas Hood never 
failed in love and duty towards his wife ; " he 
was an ideal husband," testifies Mr. Towneley 
Green, " and wholly devoted to Mrs. Hood." 
The honeymoon was spent at Hastings, and 
from thence there came to Mariane and Char- 
lotte Reynolds a letter as rich in the peculiar 
qualities of Hood's genius as any production of 
his pen. 

22 337 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" The Priory, Hastings, 

" Tuesday morning. 

" My Dear Mariane : My Dear Lot, — 
I shall leave Jane to explain to you why we have 
not written sooner, and betake myself at once to 
fill up my share of the letter ; Jane meanwhile 
resting her two sprained ankles, worn out with 
walking, or rolling rather, upon the pebbly 
beach ; for she is not, as she says, the shingle 
woman that she used to be. This morning I 
took her up to the castle, and it would have 
amused you, after I had hauled her up, with 
great labour, one of its giddy steps, to see her 
contemplating her re-descent. Behind her, an 
unkindly wall, in which there was no door to 
admit us from the level ridge to which we had 
attained ; before her, nothing but the inevitable 
steep. At the first glance downwards she seemed 
to comprehend that she must stay there all the 
day, and, as I generally do, I thought with her. 
We are neither of us a chamois, but after a good 
deal of joint scuffling and scrambling and kick- 
ing, I got her down again upon the Downs. I 
am almost afraid to tell you that we wished for 
our dear Mariane to share with us in the pros- 
pect from above. I had the pleasure besides of 
groping with her up a little corkscrew staircase 

338 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

in a ruined turret, and seeing her poke her head 
like a sweep out at the top. The place was so 
small, methought it was like exploring a marrow 
bone. 

" This is the last of our excursions. We have 
tried, but in vain, to find out the baker and his 
wife recommended to us by Lamb as the very 
lions of green Hastings. There is no such street 
as he has named throughout the town, and the 
ovens are singularly numerous. We have given 
up the search, therefore, but we have discovered 
the little church in the wood, and it is such a 
church ! It ought to have been our St. Botolph's. 
(Pray tell Ma by the way, that we read our 
marriage in the morning papers at the library, 
and it read very well.) Such a verdant covert 
wood Stothard might paint for the haunting of 
Dioneus, Pamphillus, and Flammetta as they 
walk in the novel of Boccacce. The ground 
shadowed with bluebells, even to the formation 
of a plum-like bloom upon its little knolls and 
ridges ; and ever through the dell windeth a little 
path chequered with the shades of aspens and 
ashes and the most verdant and lively of all the 
family of trees. Here a broad, rude stone step- 
peth over a lazy spring, oozing its way into grass 
and weeds ; anon a fresh pathway divergeth, you 
339 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

know not whither. Meanwhile the wild blackbird 
startles across the way and singeth anew in some 
other shade. To have seen Flammetta there, 
stepping in silk attire, like a flower, and the sun- 
light looking upon her betwixt the branches ! I 
had not walked (in the body) with romance be- 
fore. Then suppose so much of a space cleared 
as maketh a small church lawn to be sprinkled 
with old gravestones, and in the midst the church 
itself, a small Christian dovecot, such as Lamb 
has truly described it, like a little temple of Juan 
Fernandez. I could have been sentimental and 
wished to lie some day in that place, its calm 
tenants seeming to come through such quiet 
ways, through those verdant alleys, to their 
graves. 

" In coming home I killed a viper in our ser- 
pentine path, and Mrs. Fernor says I am by that 
token to overcome an enemy. Is Taylor or 
Hessey dead ? The reptile was dark and dull, 
his blood being yet sluggish from the cold ; how- 
beit, he tried to bite, till I cut him in two with 
a stone. I thought of Hessey 's long backbone 
when I did it. 

" They are called adders, tell your father, be- 
cause two and two of them together make four. 



340 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" I resume. Like people with only one heart, 
we are writing with a single pen. Mrs. Fernor 
does not let more with her apartments, and we 
are obliged to ride and tie on the stump of an old 
goose-quill. In a struggle for possession we have 
inflicted the blots above. ' Some natural drops he 
shed, but wiped them soon,' as Milton says. Our 
fire is beginning to burn on one side, a sign of a 
parting, and Mrs. Fernor is already grieving over 
our departure. On Thursday night we shall be 
at Islington and then I shall rejoice to see you 
as well as we are. I hope you have been com- 
fortable, dear, and accustomed my house to the 
command which it is to comply with. I hope 
Green hath been often on Islington Green, which 
loveth you ; you will have learned from our to- 
pography to approach the Angel. I hope Ma 
hath hanselled our teacups. I hope my garden is 
transplanted into Mr. Oldenhaws'. I hope Dash 
is well and behaves well. But shortly I shall 
have an answer to all my anticipations. Now 
we must leave Hastings, the pleasant scene of 
our setting half-honeymoon. Oh, Lot, could'st 
thou but see the teacups at Mr. Davis's ! Thou 
would'st shed some drops at quitting the place ! 
Pots, there is enamel, there is quaintness and 
richness of pattern ! Not tea merely, but kettles 

341 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

with gilded handles, gorgeous coffee-pots, tran- 
scending even thy own shelf. In one thing thou 
wert shelfish, in not giving us that brown teapot. 
Nay, thou art worse than Mr. Davis, for his are 
to be got for money, if not for love. 

" To-morrow we go to Lovers' Seat, as it is 
called, to hallow it by our presence. Oh, how 
I wish we had you upon Lovers' Seat, which 
took its name from the appointments of a fair 
maiden with a gallant lieutenant ! He was in 
the preventive service, but his love was contra- 
band, and in a romantic bay they used to elude 
the parental excise. Good-bye. God bless you, 
my dears, till we meet again. I long to meet you 
again as your Brother, most proud and happy in 
your affection. My love and duty to our good 
Mother and to our Father. 

" Your own affectionate friend and Brother, 

" T. Hood." 

It would appear from the above letter that 
the young couple began housekeeping in the 
Islington district, but ere long they removed 
to Robert Street, Adelphi. During the twenty 
years of their married life, the Hoods had no 
fewer than eleven homes, but in the first three 
they seemed to have dwelt for rather longer than 

342 




Robert Street, Adelfhi 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

the average of two years suggested by compar- 
ing both totals. The house they resided in at 
Robert Street, from about 1825 to 1829, was 
No. 2 — a fact now, for the first time, established 
by Mr. Towneley Green's papers — and, save 
that the building has lost its numerical identity 
by absorption into the hotel which occupies the 
whole of the left-hand side of the street, this 
early home of the poet has changed but little 
during the past seventy years. Here their first 
child was born, and, breathing its last almost 
with its first cry, here arrived those tender lines of 
Lamb, " On an Infant Dying as soon as Born." 
While still dwelling in Robert Street, Hood 
edited one of those Annuals so popular in Eng- 
land seventy or eighty years ago, the title being 
" The Gem," and the date of publication 1829. 
He was an industrious editor, casting his net 
far and wide. A letter from the Quaker poet, 
Bernard Barton, in answer to a request for a con- 
tribution from his pen, has so many points of 
interest that it deserves quotation in connection 
with this phase of Hood's literary enterprise. 

" WoODBRIDGE, 

April 26"th, 1828. 

" My Dear Friend, — I had almost, not 
sworn, for we friendly folk use not such attes- 

345 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

tations, I had well-nigh affirmed I would have 
nothing more to do with Annuals, saving that 
of my old friend Ackerman, which I write for 
from mere habit ; but an application for an 
article to one conducted by thee and contributed 
by Elia will go far to induce me to try what I 
can do. Pray let me know, as early as may be, 
what is the latest I can be allowed. 

"If anybody can make ought of such a specu- 
lation I know no one whose chances of success 
are better than thine ; but I doubt the day is 
somewhat gone by. The thing was overdone, 
I fear, last year ; and I hear of new ones start- 
ing. I had a letter a day or two ago from one 
of the joint authors of ' Body and Soul,' stating 
that he was about editing a new one. Whether 
it was the Body-man, or the Soul-man who 
addressed me, I know not ! If only the former 
there are hopes for thee ; if the latter, thou must 
prepare for a rivalry for Spirits. But 1 never 
read their joint Production, so perhaps there 
may be little difference betwixt them. 

" What is thy Annual to be called, and who is 
to publish it ? ' These little things are great to 
little men,' and to little books too. I am glad 
the old sentimental Title is to be abandoned. 
The ' Pledge of Friendship ' must have been hit 

346 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

on, I opine, by some enamoured swain, or sigh- 
ing Nymph ; it is an unmeaning designation, for 
anything, everything, or nothing may be a pledge 
of what passes by courtesy for Friendship. How 
to supply its place, however, by anything appro- 
priate and new, is beyond my powers of sugges- 
tion ; the change cannot well be for the worse, 
that's one comfort. 

" Hast thou seen or heard ought of Elia lately ? 
I had a few lines from him a day or two back, 
written in worse spirits than I ever knew him 
exemplify. He said he was ill, too ; pray let me 
know he is better, for I should be loth to think 
him so bad as that notelet indicated. 

"In conclusion, may I hope for the indulgent 
forgiveness of one cautionary hint, suggested by 
no meddling spirit of officious impertinence, but 
by a cordial desire for the success of the new 
undertaking, and a hearty interest in thy endur- 
ing fame. No one, I believe, ever undervalued 
wit who had the slightest capacity to appreciate 
its point and brilliancy ; I am well aware of the 
temptations to which so seductive a faculty is 
likely to expose its lively and mercurial possessor ; 
but ' Hal ! and thou lovest me,' pshaw ! that 's 
nothing, — I mean, if thou hast a due regard to 
a still more lasting, pure, and enviable Name, do 

347 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

not in thy own contributions or in those accepted 
from others, suffer those merry quips and cranks 
to exclude totally more simple and sober articles. 
Heartily as I have laughed over many of thy 
lively sallies, several of these, despite their point 
and originality, I have forgotten ; but not a let- 
ter or line of the verses ' I Remember, I Remem- 
ber,' have from the first perusal of them been 
long absent from my recollection. The touching 
simplicity and the deep pathos of those few wit- 
less verses electrified more at the moment by 
their perusal than the same quantum of poetry 
ever did before or since. I would rather be the 
author of those lines than of almost any modern 
volume of poetry published during the last ten 
years. This may seem extravagant, but I know 
it is written in no complimentary mood. 
" Thine truly, 

" B. Barton." 

Tempting as it might be to show how far this 
letter bore fruit, and to dwell upon the literary 
activity of Hood in its various ramifications, it is 
necessary to turn once again to the more per- 
sonal aspect of his life. How he celebrated one 
marriage in the Reynolds family has already been 
mentioned, and it now remains to dwell for a 

348 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

moment on a characteristic water-colour sketch, 
with which he commemorated the wedding of 
his favourite, Mariane. The bridegroom was 
that Mr. Green who has figured frequently in 




Sketch by Hood to Celebrate the Marriage of 
Mariane Reynolds 

the letters given above, and he is depicted in the 
guise of one of those " Jacks-of-the-Green," so 
ubiquitous on May Day in London a generation 
ago. As he takes his bride by the hand, the 
while the parson recites the words which make 
the two one, her face assumes a greenish hue. A 
gentleman in obtrusive goggles at the rear of the 

349 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

bridegroom is Mr. Green's brother, and the lady 
on his left, with a hook instead of a hand, is in- 
tended for Miss Charlotte Reynolds, the only 
member of the family to retain her single state. 
Behind her again is her sister Eliza, Mrs. Long- 
more, and on the extreme left of the sketch 




Rose Cottage, Winchmore Hill 



stand Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, senior. Nor did 
the perpetrator of this humorous wedding record 
spare himself, for Hood is to be observed in the 
right-hand corner, quaffing wine from a commu- 
nion cup ! 

Notwithstanding that formidable hook, and, 
what was more to the purpose, a winning sweet- 

350 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

ness of disposition, Charlotte Reynolds, as already 
indicated, remained faithful to the character Hood 
made her assume in his " Number One." She 
attained a ripe old age, dying in 1884, after hav- 
ing lived many years in the Hampstead home of 




Lake House, Wanstead 



her two gifted nephews, the late Mr. Charles 
Green, R. I., and the late Mr. Towneley Green, 
R. I. 

When the Hoods removed from Robert Street, 
some time in 1829, they found their next home 
in a picturesque cottage on Winchmore Hill. 
Probably some additions have been made to the 

351 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

rear of the building since that date, but other- 
wise it is unaltered, and with its roomy bay- 
windows, its creeper-clad walls, and its lovely 
garden, it remains to this day a picture of an 
ideal home for a poet. Hood's home instincts 
took deeper root at Winchmore Hill than any- 
where else. " He was much attached to it," 
wrote his daughter, " and many years afterwards 
I have known him to point out some fancied 
resemblance in other places, and say to my 
mother, ' Jenny, that 's very like Winchmore ! ' ' 
In 1832 there came another removal, this time 
to Lake House, Wanstead. Here, again, there 
has been little change since the days of Hood's 
tenancy. Wedged in between the borders of 
Wanstead Park and that narrow tree-covered 
promontory of Epping Forest which reaches out 
as far south on the left, there may still be seen 
the picturesque few acres which constitute Lake 
House Park. The house, built almost wholly of 
wood, contains nine or ten bedrooms, a spacious 
kitchen, and a large dining-hall, which occupies 
almost the entire length of the building in the 
rear. In the garden behind the house are two 
old cherry-trees, and some years ago the larger 
of these was adorned with a copper plate bearing 
this inscription : " In pity for the woes of woman- 

352 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

kind, beneath this ancient tree Thomas Hood 
wrote the ' Song of the Shirt,' — ' Stitch, Stitch, 
Stitch.' " The tablet is gone, and the hope may 
be expressed that if the desire to replace it 
should ever have a practical issue, care will be 




Hood's Trees at Wanstead 



taken not to perpetrate the falsehood of the old 
inscription ; for it was not here, and in 1832, that 
the " Song of the Shirt " was written, but in the 
Elm-tree Road, St. John's Wood, in 1843. 

Some family portrait-painting of abiding in- 
terest was achieved during the Lake House days, 
for it was here, in the opinion of Mr. Towneley 

23 353 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

Green, that the portraits of Hood and his wife in 
the National Portrait Gallery were executed. 
Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds, senior, happened to be 

on a visit to Lake 
House at the time, 
and the latter was 
induced to sit for 
her portrait also. 
But no persuasion 
availed to lead Mr. 
Reynolds to face 
the same ordeal. 
Thus it happens 
that the only sur- 
viving record of 
his personal ap- 
pearance is a time- 
stained pen-and- 

Mrs. Hood, n6e Jane Reynolds • 1 -, . i 1) 4- 

if his son-in-law could not persuade him to sit 
for his portrait he had little difficulty in inducing 
him to assume one day the character of a J. P. 
of the county. Several small boys had been 
caught in the act of plundering the cherry-tree 
above mentioned, and Hood could not resist the 
temptation of reading them a lesson by a mock 
trial. So the culprits were haled before the old 

354 





No. 17, Elm-tree Road, St. John's Wood 






IN OLD ENGLAND 

gentleman sitting in state in the dining-hall, and 
were duly sentenced to instant execution on the 
tree from which their thefts had been committed. 
The poet's infant 
daughter had been 
previously coached 
to plead for mercy, 
and at her entrea- 
ties the sentence 
was as solemnly 
revoked as it had 
been pronounced. 
From the early 
months of 1835 
to the autumn of 
1840, Hood was 
an exile, living first 
at Coblenz and 
afterwards at Os- 

, T . Thomas Hood 

tend. It is not 

necessary to dwell upon the sequence of mone- 
tary misfortunes which drove him to the Con- 
tinent for the sake of cheap living, but those 
misfortunes ought never to be mentioned with- 
out the reminder being given that they were due 
to no fault on his side. When at last it be- 
came possible for him to return home, he resided 
357 




LITERARY BY-PATHS 

for a brief season near Camberwell Green, remov- 
ing to No. 17, Elm-tree Road, St. John's Wood, 
towards the end of 1841, on his being appointed 
editor of Colburn's " New Monthly Magazine " 
at a salary of £300 a year. In this house he 
resided until the Christmas of 1843, when he 
made his final flitting to Devonshire Lodge, 
New Finchley Road. That building, however 
— the scene of his death in 1845 — is no longer 
standing. 

Hood's appointment as editor of the " New 
Monthly Magazine" was hailed with genuine 
satisfaction on all hands, and through the whole 
of 1842, and well on towards the end of the 
next year, he continued to discharge the duties 
of that position in such a manner as to fulfil all 
the favourable prophecies of his friends. Then 
there arose some misunderstanding between Mr. 
Colburn and his editor, in the midst of which 
the latter received the following letter from his 
staunch friend, Charles Dickens. It will assist 
in its interpretation if the reader bears in mind 
that when Hood received it he was on the eve 
of a visit to Scotland, undertaken partly for 
health's sake, but also in the hope that his jour- 
ney might have a profitable issue in literary 
employment. 

358 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

" Broadstairs, Kent. 

"Twelfth September, 1843. 

" My Dear Hood, — Since I received your 
first letter I have been pegging away tooth and 
nail at Chuzzlewit. Your supplementary note 
gave me a pang, such as one feels when a friend 
has to knock twice at the street door before 
anybody opens it. 

" There can be no doubt in the mind of any 
honourable man, that the circumstances under 
which you signed your agreement are of the 
most disgraceful kind, in so far as Mr. Colburn 
is concerned. There can be no doubt that he 
took a money-lending, bill-broking, Jew-clothes- 
bagging, Saturday-night-pawnbroking advantage 
of your temporary situation. There is little 
doubt (so I learn from Forster, who had pre- 
viously given me exactly your version of the cir- 
cumstances) that, like most pieces of knavery, 
this precious document is a mere piece of folly, 
and just a scrap of wastepaper wherein Mr. 
Schobel might wrap his Chity-snuff. But I am 
sorry, speaking with a backward view to the feasi- 
bility of placing you in a better situation with 
Colburn, that you flung up the Editorship of 
the magazine. I think you did so at a bad time, 
and wasted your strength in consequence. 
359 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

" When a thing is done it is of no use giving 
advice, not even when it can be as frankly 
rejected as mine can be by you. But have you 
quite determined to reject his offer of thirty 
guineas per sheet ? Have you placed it, or 
resolved to place it, out of your power to enter 
into such an arrangement, if you should feel dis- 
posed to do so, by-and-bye ? On my word, I 
would pause before I did so, and if I did, then 
most decidedly I would open a communication 
with Bentley, and try to get that magazine. 
For to any man, I don't care who he is, the 
Editorship of a monthly magazine, on tolerable 
terms, is a matter of too much moment, in its 
pecuniary importance and certainty, to be flung 
away as of little worth. It would be to me, I 
assure you. 

" I send you letters for Jeffrey and Napier. 
If the former should not be in Edinburgh, you 
will find him at his country place, Craigcrook, 
within three or four miles of that city. Should 
you see Wilson, give him a hundred hearty 
greetings from me ; and should you see the 
Blackwoods, don't believe a word they say to 
you. Moir (their Delta) is a very fine fellow, 
and you will like him very much. In all prob- 
ability he will come to see you, should he know 
360 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

of your being in Edinburgh. A pleasant jour- 
ney, and a pleasant return : Mrs. Dickens unites 
with me in best regards to Mrs. Hood, and I am 
always, my dear Hood. 

" Faithfully yours, 

<k Charles Dickens. 

" P. S. The light of Mr. Colburn's counte- 
nance has not shone upon me in these parts. 
May I remain in outer darkness ! " 

Notwithstanding the advice of Dickens — per- 
haps it was too late — Hoods rupture with Mr. 
Colburn was complete before the year ended, 
and January 1844, saw the first issue of his own 
venture, bearing the title of " Hood's Magazine." 
He had suffered so much from publishers that he 
determined to issue the magazine himself, and 
an office for that purpose was secured at No. 1, 
Adam Street, Adelphi. Here he worked early 
and late at his editorial labours, and here he 
occasionally slept when the pressure of work was 
high. The magazine was a pronounced success 
from its first issue, and, had life and health been 
in store for Hood, there can be no question but 
it would have proved a valuable property. But 
the sixth issue of the monthly contained those 

361 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 




No. 1, Adam Street, Adelphi 

pathetic " Editor's Apologies " which have been 
already referred to, and although he rallied 
somewhat from the attack by which they were 
occasioned, henceforth there was little hope for 

362 




Hood's Grave in Kensal Green Cemetery 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

any material prolongation of life. With the 
issue of the magazine for March 1845, there was 
given an engraving of the bust of the Editor, 
and it was this portrait, specially printed on large 
plate paper, which Hood chose as his farewell 
gift to his friends. Between the attacks of pain, 
he sat up in bed to inscribe on each copy his sig- 
nature and a few affectionate words, the number 
in the end reaching upwards of a hundred. 
These were to be his last messages to those who 
knew and loved him. He died on the 3rd 
May, 1845, and on a July day, nine years later, 
JMonckton JMilnes unveiled the monument which 
rests above his grave in Kensal Green Cemetery. 
Beneath the bust there runs the legend " He sang 
the Song of the Shirt," and on either side of the 
pedestal are bas-relief medallions of "Eugene 
Arams Dream," and " The Bridge of Sighs " — 
all pertinent reminders of the fact that there was 
a serious as well as a humorous side to the genius 
of Hood. 

He himself, there can be no doubt, would 
have elected to live by his serious verse, for 
when the public refused to purchase his " Plea 
of the Midsummer Fairies," did he not buy up 
the edition to " save it from the butter-shops " ? 
If, even after death, there can be no dissolution 
365 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

of the dual domination of Humour and Pathos, 
at least let it be confessed that, in his graver 
moods, Thomas Hood achieved work which is 
not unworthy to be garnered with the choicest 
fruits of English poesy. 




Medallion on Hood's Monument 



366 



XI 

ROYAL WINCHESTER 



XI 

ROYAL WINCHESTER 

" Behold a pupil of the monkish gown, 
The pious Alfred, King to Justice dear ! 
Lord of the harp and liberating spear ; 
Mirror of Princes ! Indigent Renown 
Might range the starry ether for a crown 
Equal to his deserts." 

William Wordsworth. 

Time was when Winchester, the " royal city," as 
Kingsley called it, far out-rivalled London in 
prosperity and business activity, and if for many 
generations the Hampshire capital has been left 
hopelessly behind by the great metropolis, it can 
still boast a fascination to which London can 
make no claim. I ndeed, of all the ancient cathe- 
dral cities of England, over which the peace of 
the old-time world seems perpetually to brood, 
there is not one which can compete with Win- 
chester for richness of historical interest. And, 
as is not usually the case, that historic interest 
becomes more living and intense with every pass- 
ing generation. "It is not in death, but in the 
24 369 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

beautiful tranquillity of serene old age that Win- 
chester reposes in her sweet green valley low 
down among the swelling hills that compass her 
about. No English city has such a noble record 
in the past, or a life more peaceful in our rushing, 
hasteful age." 

Though from the time of Egbert to long after 
the Norman Conquest, the history of Winchester 
is a summary of the history of England, and hence 
has memorable associations with the names of 
Ethelred, Edward the Elder, Canute the Dane, 
and Norman William, it is mainly because of its 
reminiscences of Alfred the Great that the city 
possesses such undying interest. After the lapse 
of a thousand years Winchester is still perme- 
ated by the presence of the great Anglo-Saxon 
king. Here he spent some part of his boyhood, 
pupil the while of that St. Swithun whose essential 
greatness of character is eclipsed in these days by 
his supposed bad connection with the too watery 
nature of English skies. Alfred made Winches- 
ter the capital of the English people ; there he 
held his court what time his land was at peace ; 
within its walls he devised those wise laws which 
will ever lend a fragrance to his memory ; here 
he directed the penning of that book which stands 
first on the illustrious roll of English prose. In 
370 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

AVinchester, too, he laid down the burden of his 
life, and the soil of that city holds somewhere to 
this day the precious dust of that perfect king. 

In a thousand years, time plays sad havoc with 
the visible environments of famous men, and 




Wolvesev Castle 

hence it is not surprising that so far as stones 
and mortar go, there is little left which can help 
us to picture the conditions amid which Alfred 
passed his life. But what little still exists must 
be sought mainly at Winchester. In the ruins 
of Wolvesey Castle, for example, the historic 
imagination possesses rich material to aid it in 
constructing a picture of one important phase of 
Alfred's work. It was here that, at his com- 
371 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

mand and under his direction, the " Anglo-Saxon 
Chronicle " was compiled and copied. By the 
common consent of scholars, this book is the first 
history of the English people, and the " earliest 
and most venerable monument of English prose." 
To stand among the ruins of Wolvesey Castle, 
then, is to stand at the fountain-head of our lit- 
erature. On this spot, within these grey, crum- 
bling walls, there took rise that stream of English 
writing which for these thousand years has rolled 
onward, ever increasing in volume and breadth. 
Parts of the " Chronicle " were written by Alfred 
himself, and the ancient manuscript, that which 
used to be chained to a desk in Wolvesey Castle, 
so that all might read it who could, may still be 
seen in the library of Corpus Christi College, 
Oxford. 

Alfred was buried first in the Old Minster at 
Winchester, but the canons affirmed that his 
ghost walked at nights and gave them no rest, 
and in the end they prevailed upon his son 
Edward to remove the remains to the New Min- 
ster, which Alfred himself had founded in order 
to keep a certain prior at his court. In the New 
Minster the King found peace for a century or so, 
but when the monks were turned out of that 
building and sent to Hyde Abbey in another 

372 






IN OLD ENGLAND 

part of the city, they took with them the sacred 
dust of the monarch who had founded their 
house. With the burial of Alfred's body at 
Hyde Abbey it vanishes from our sight. For in 
the eighteenth century Hyde Abbey was almost 
wholly demolished, and then the last authentic 
traces of the King's resting-place disappeared. Of 
the Abbey itself there are only one or two frag- 
ments remaining. There is the entrance gateway, 
the corbels of which are thought to be por- 
traits of Alfred and his son, and on the other 
side of that gateway is a building, now used for 
farm purposes, which formed part of the original 
structure. Some years ago, however, during ex- 
cavations here, a coffin was laid bare which is 
thought to have been that of the King, and this 
was reverently re-buried at the east end of Hyde 
Church on the opposite side of the street. 

Amid these scenes which are so redolent of his 
memory, the pilgrim cannot fail to ask himself 
what manner of man was this king whom all 
conspire to honour, who is described as "the only 
perfect man of action recorded in history," who 
is held up as the typical man of the Anglo-Saxon 
race at its best and noblest ? Historical criticism 
has handled very roughly the stories with which 
the school-books of childhood used to brighten 
375 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the record of his life, and we are told that we 
must no longer believe he was so impractical a 
man as to allow his own supper to get burnt on 
the hearth, or that he was so unwary a general 
as to go about masquerading with a harp in the 
enemy's camp. But are not the critics unjust in 
their treatment of Asser, that Welsh priest whose 
life of Alfred is our chief source of information ? 
They seem to accept his authority for dry-as- 
dust statements, but pooh-pooh him when he 
indulges in a little Boswellianism. Let Asser 
speak for Alfred for a moment, then, speak out of 
that overflowing admiration which the great king 
had the secret to inspire, living or dead, in those 
who had looked on his face, and in those who 
think of him a thousand years after. " He was 
loved by his father and mother," writes Asser, 
" and even by all the people, above all by his 
brothers. As he advanced through the years 
of infancy and youth, his form appeared more 
comely than that of his brothers; in look, in 
speech, and in manners he was more graceful than 
they. His noble nature implanted in him from 
his cradle a love of wisdom above all things." Is 
it any wonder that when he took the crown it 
was " amid the acclamations of all the people," 
and that when he came forth to lead his men 
376 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

against the Danes, his followers " were joyful at 



his 



presence 



After all it is but a mere handful of stories that 
we have of Alfred, and we will not be robbed of 




Supposed Grave of Alfred the Great 



these. We shall go on believing that he let the 
cakes burn on the hearth while lost in thought on 
the future of his country ; no pedantic verdict 
shall explain away the legend which makes him 
become his own intelligence officer by assuming 
the guise of a harper in order to penetrate the 
377 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

enemy's camp ; nor shall any criticism shake our 
faith in that pretty story of his youth which tells 
how his mother offered a richly illuminated book 
to that one of her sons who could first repeat its 
contents, with the result that Alfred won the 
prize. 

Although, thanks to the fears of those timid 
canons, the cathedral does not enshrine the dust 
of Alfred the Great, there still repose beneath its 
roof those mortuary chests in which an early 
bishop of the diocese deposited the bones of 
Egbert, Canute, Edmund, and other kings. 
Even if these quaint caskets could be inspected 
more closely than is possible owing to their ele- 
vated position on the summits of the tracery 
screens of the choir, there are probably few who 
would regard them otherwise than with feelings 
of " cold curiosity or vague admiration." It 
would be otherwise had the dust of Alfred re- 
tained a shrine here ; he is a living memory still, 
with power to inspire a personal affection rarely 
felt for kings ; but these other memorials of 
royalty somehow lack the power to touch the 
heart. While wandering through Westminster 
Abbey, Washington Irving noticed that visitors 
always remained longest in the vicinity of Poets' 
Corner. " They linger about these monuments 

378 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

as about the tombs of friends and companions ; 
for indeed there is something of companionship 
between author and reader. Other men are 
known to posterity only through the medium of 
history, which is continually growing faint and 
obscure ; but the intercourse between the author 
and his fellow-men is ever new, active, and 
immediate." 

Happily, Winchester Cathedral does not lack 
memorials of some of those great dead for whom 
all men entertain a personal affection. For ex- 
ample, in the floor of Prior Silkstede's Chapel a 
black marble stone marks the last resting-place 
of Izaak Walton. As soon as he was released 
from the burden of business, this childlike old 
man, with the ruddy cheek and laughing eye, 
as Hazlitt imagined him, passed peacefully from 
parsonage to deanery, or bishop's palace, linger- 
ing longest, we may be sure, where quiet rivers 
most abounded. This helps to explain why the 
home of his son-in-law, Dr. Hawkins, who was a 
prebendary of Winchester, proved so increasingly 
attractive in the angler's later years. On the 
ninetieth anniversary of his birth, Izaak Walton, 
sheltered by his son-in-law's roof at Winchester, 
sat down to write his will. Having disposed of 
his principal properties to his son-in-law, his 
379 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

daughter, and his son, and having arranged that 
these three shall each come into the possession 
of a memorial ring bearing the motto " Love 
my Memory. I. WV', the old man added, " I 




Izaak Walton's Grave 



desire my burial to be near the place of my 
death, and free from all ostentation or charge, 
but privately." Four months later, when the 
great frost of 1683 held all England in its iron 
grip, the venerable old man entered into his rest. 
So this grave was prepared for him in Prior 
Silkstede's Chapel, and the quaint inscription 
tells that — 

380 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

Here Resteth the body of 

Mr Isaac Walton 

Who Dyed the 13th of December 

1683. 

Alas ! hees gone before 
Gone to return noe more 
Our panting Breasts aspire 
After their aged Sire 
Whose well-spent life did last 
Full ninety yeares and past 
But now he hath begun 
That which will ne 're be done 
Crown'd with eternall blisse 
We wish our Souls with his. 

Folis Modestis sic flerunt Libert 

When that quiet funeral took place in Prior 
Silkstede's Chapel, none of the sorrowing mourners 
who were there taking farewell of the aged angler 
saw the fresco which is now seen to adorn the 
wall of that tiny chapel. Its subject is the call- 
ing of Peter, who, in an attitude of fear, holds 
tightly to the prow of his boat, and its existence 
has only been known some fifty years. How it 
would have pleased Walton could he have been 
aware of this painting on the walls of his death 
chamber, for he was never weary of exalting his 
art by dwelling upon the fact that for four of 
his apostles Christ chose fishermen, and that 
" He never reproved these for their employment 

381 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

or calling, as He did scribes and the money- 
lenders." 

There is a legend which tells that a verger of 
Winchester Cathedral, questioned repeatedly as 
to the whereabouts of a certain lady's tomb in 
that minster, once enquired whether there was 
anything remarkable about that lady that so many 
should ask to see the spot where she lay, — which 
would seem to show that Jane Austen is not with- 
out honour save in the city where she died. 

In one respect Jane Austen is more fortunate 
in her Winchester associations than John Keats. 
Two years after the novelist had breathed her 
last in the peaceful old cathedral city, the poet 
dwelt within its walls for a couple of months. 
It was at the fall of the year, and as he wandered 
amid the meadows which encircle the city so 
pleasantly on either side, there came to the poet 
that inspiration which has left its mark on English 
literature for all time in the haunting " Ode to 
Autumn." But Keats came and went without 
the people of Winchester being aware of his 
presence. Although the house in which Jane 
Austen died in 1817 is known and marked with 
a tablet, the house in which Keats lived in 1819 
is unknown, and, it is to be feared, hopelessly 
lost to the literary pilgrim. 

382 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

When Jane Austen, in May 1817, removed 
to lodgings at Winchester, to avail herself of 
expert medical advice, the hand of death was 




House in which Jane Austen died 



already upon her. It was in College Street she 
took up her quarters, in a house adjoining the 
famous college of William of Wykeham. " Our 
lodgings," she wrote, " are very comfortable. 

383 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

We have a neat little drawing-room, with a bow 
window overlooking Dr. Cabell's garden." In 
the same hopeful letter she makes a playful 
allusion to her doctor. " Mr. Lyford says he 
will cure me, and if he fails, I shall draw up a 




Jane Austen's Grave 



memorial and lay it before the Dean and Chapter, 
and have no doubt of redress from that pious, 
learned, and disinterested body." Jane Austen 
was even then nearer needing the services of the 
Dean, or one of his clergy, than she knew. To 
the kindly friend who asked in the closing hour 
if there were anything she wanted, Jane Austen 

384 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

made answer, " Nothing but death." For her 
tired body that wish was soon granted, but for her 
fame there is an enduring immortality. Close 
by the side of that bow window with which she 
was so pleased, a tablet now records that " In 
this house Jane Austen lived her last days and 
died July 18th, 1817." 

Hardly could there be imagined a more 
seemly resting-place for Jane Austen than that 
grey old minster in which her body was laid to 
rest. There is about this building an aloofness 
from the feverish haste of modern life which 
makes complete harmony with the pages of that 
writer who has mirrored so faithfully a social life 
so far removed from our own. Her grave 
must be sought near the centre of the north 
aisle, and it, like that of Izaak Walton, is cov- 
ered with a simple slab of black marble. The 
inscription dwells with characteristic emphasis 
upon what she was rather than upon what she 
did. Her own family were more fond of her 
than proud. " The benevolence of her heart," so 
runs the inscription, "and the extraordinary 
endowments of her mind, obtained the regard 
of all who knew her, and the warmest love of her 
intimate connections." A variation of the same 
eulogy may be read on the brass which adorns 

25 385 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

the wall of the cathedral opposite the grave ; 
" endeared to her family by the varied charms of 
her character " is its testimony. 

It may seem incongruous that a building so 
pronouncedly ecclesiastical as a deanery should 




Winchester Deanery 



revive memories of so notorious a courtesan as 
Nell G wynne ; but the fact that the deanery at 
Winchester, which may be found within the 
exquisite precincts of the cathedral, does recall 
that fascinating woman casts no reflection upon 
the worthy Dr. Ken. It was all the fault of the 
" Merry Monarch " himself. When Charles II 
386 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

was visiting Winchester while engrossed with 
his plans for the building of a royal residence in 
that historic city, Mistress Nell was, of course, 
in attendance, and it became necessary to pro- 
vide her with a lodging. It happened that Dr. 
Ken, then prebendary of the cathedral, had a 
snug little home at the deanery, and Charles 
promptly coveted the place for his mistress. He 
himself was lodging at the deanery, and the 
arrangement he suggested would, no doubt, have 
been extremely convenient. But Dr. Ken did 
not see eye to eye with his monarch ; in fact, he 
stoutly refused to give Mistress Nell the shelter 
of the deanery roof. Charles was too sensible a 
man to take umbrage at such a creditable exhibi- 
tion of independence, and when the Bishopric of 
Bath and Wells became vacant, he promptly 
enquired, " Where is the good little man who 
refused his lodging to poor Nell ? " 

Emerson has told how he and Carlyle, when 
returning from their memorable pilgrimage to 
Stonehenge, "stopped at the Church of Saint 
Cross, and, after looking through the quaint 
antiquity, we demanded a piece of bread and a 
draught of beer, which the founder, Henry de 
Blois in 1136, commanded should be given to 
everyone who should ask it at the gate." 

387 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

For more than seven hundred years one day 
has been the same as any other at this " quaint 
antiquity" of St. Cross. In that long span of 
time empires have grown and decayed, but their 




The Entrance to St. Cross 

coming or their passing has made no stir in 
the peaceful life of these time-stained cloisters. 
Since the twelfth century, when Bishop Henry 
de Blois reared this monastic almshouse amid 
the green fields by the side of the river Itchen, 

388 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

there has been no change at St. Cross, and the 
brethren, in their accomplishment of the " daily 
round, the common task," in the reign of King 
Edward VII perpetuate the life of their prede- 
cessors in the reign of King Stephen. 

It is a trite remark that the monks of the 
olden time knew where to pitch their tents — a 
remark which is supported by the nature-setting 
of every ancient abbey in England. Renunci- 
ation of the world, apparently, was not deemed 
inconsistent with the selection of the most pic- 
turesque spot possible in which to endure that 
renunciation ! True, St. Cross is not exactly 
a monastery, but its original foundation ap- 
proached near enough to that class of religious 
establishment to warrant Henry de Blois in 
selecting a site for his building on the monkish 
principle of tempering one's renunciation of 
the world as far as possible. And what a site it 
is ! At the foot of St. Catherine's Hill, about a 
mile from Winchester, the placid Itchen has 
moistened a little valley into a verdant paradise, 
and here, amid bosky trees, with their roots deep 
buried under velvety sward, Henry de Blois 
built his Hospital of St. Cross. 

Not all the honour of St. Cross belongs to 
Henry de Blois. Three centuries after the first 
389 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

foundation was made, Cardinal Beaufort added 
to its wealth, and to the present day there is a 
distinction between Henry de Blois brethren and 
Beaufort brethren. The distinction, however, 
practically resolves itself into one of dress 
merely, for while the pensioners of St. Cross 
are attired in a long black gown, whose sole 
ornament is that of a silver cross on the left 
breast, the Beaufort brethren are resplendent in a 
red robe embroidered with a cardinal's hat and 
tassels. The two foundations conjointly provide 
a peaceful old-age haven for seventeen brethren, 
who, with their delightful little homes, their well- 
tended gardens, their daily dinner from the com- 
mon hall, and their modest income of hard cash, 
provide the statesman with ideal examples of an 
old-age pension state. 

Under the Beaufort Tower, which ensures 
lasting memory for at least one of the founder's 
names, is situated the porter's lodge, and in that 
lodge the visitor finds the raw materials by which 
St. Cross maintains its most interesting survival 
of the past. Those materials are a barrel of beer 
and a loaf of bread. No one knocks in vain at 
the door of St. Cross. It is a picturesque and 
irritating legend of history that in the good old 
times every great house of England kept open 

390 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

table, whereat the hungry wayfarer was certain 
of a welcome and a meal. Perhaps that picture 
is a pleasing generalisation of the historic imagi- 
nation, but St. Cross can claim to furnish concrete 
proof of its truth in at least one case. For seven 
centuries the hungry and the thirsty have never 
called here to be sent empty away, and hence, 
even in this era of 
enlightenment, when 
every pauper may have 
his night's rest and a 
meal in exchange for 
labour, there is still 
one hospitable shelter 
in England which 
keeps its continuity The Dole at St - Cross 

with the past by giving every caller a horn of 
beer and a slice of bread for nothing. Of course 
there are many people who drink the beer and 
eat the bread of St. Cross without having any 
pressing necessity for either. Emerson and Car- 
lyle cannot have been distressingly hungry or 
wholly devoid of cash with which to provide for 
their bodily needs on the day they called here. 
But their visit has added another association of 
interest to St. Cross, for the silver-mounted cups 
and the wooden platter which served the usual 
391 




LITERARY BY-PATHS 

dole to those notable visitors are now numbered 
.among the relics of the place. Nor are they 
relics merely, for the ordinary visitor is privileged 
to have his dole handed out in the same cup and 
on the same platter. Still, a certain distinction is 
made between callers at St. Cross. For the use of 
the tramp there is a larger horn, innocent of silver 
mountings, and with that longer draught of ale is 
supplied a portion of bread in keeping therewith. 

Among the show buildings of St. Cross are 
the old kitchen, the dining-hall, and the church. 
Time has stood still in that kitchen as well as else- 
where in this mediaeval retreat. All the appli- 
ances for cooking are of a long past time, and 
would strike the twentieth-century chef as little 
better than relics of a barbaric age. In the 
dining-hall it is still the past rather than the 
present which is in evidence — the black leathern 
jacks, the candlesticks, the salt-cellars, the pew- 
ter dishes, and the dinner-bell, all dating from 
the fifteenth century. The church, too, is of 
venerable age, its oldest portions having been 
reared in the twelfth century. 

In wandering round the cloisters of this old- 
world haven, which give witness so mutely of an 
age so foreign to our own, the memory strives to 
recall some mellowed passage of prose or poetry 
392 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

by which to voice the emotions which rise un- 
bidden in the heart, and perhaps there is no pas- 
sage so perfectly in harmony with this scene as 
that in which Ruskin has so subtly analysed the 
charm of ancient buildings. " The greatest glory 




In the Cloisters 



St. 



of a building," he wrote, " is not in its stones nor 
in its gold. Its glory is in its Age, and in that 
deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of 
mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or 
condemnation, which we feel in walls that have 
long been washed by the passing waves of hu- 
manity. It is in their lasting witness against 
393 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional 
characters of all things, in the strength which, 
through the lapse of seasons and times, and the 
decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing 
of the face of the earth, and of the limits of 
the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a 
time insuperable, connects forgotten and follow- 
ing ages with each other, and half constitutes the 
identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of na- 
tions : it is in that golden stain of time that 
we are to look for the real light and colour and 
preciousness of architecture ; and it is not until 
a building has assumed this character, till it has 
been entrusted with the fame and hallowed by the 
deeds of men, till its walls have been witness of 
suffering and its pillars rise out of the shadows of 
death, that its existence, more lasting as it is than 
that of natural objects of the world around it, 
can be gifted with even so much as these possess 
of language and of life." 

Having wandered afield from Winchester to 
visit St. Cross, the pilgrim will not begrudge 
another hour or so that he may gaze upon the 
old schoolhouse in which Pope received the be- 
ginnings of his education, especially as the road 
thither will take him past the mansion in which 
Benjamin Franklin wrote the early chapters of 
3in 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

his " Autobiography." Both these buildings are 
in the hamlet of Twyford, which claims, and not 
unjustly, to be the queen of Hampshire villages. 
Despite the fact, noted by Lowell in his pene- 
trating essay, that we know more about Pope 



■ ^ 




Pope's Schoolhouse at Twyford 



than about any other poet, that " he kept no 
secrets about himself," he was singularly reticent 
concerning the incidents of his boyhood days. 
No doubt there is little to say about a boy of 
eight, which was the age of the poet when he 
attended school at Twyford, but Pope was so 
prematurely old that even the first decade of 
395 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

such a youth might have been expected to yield 
something of interest. Beyond the bare fact, 
however, that he was sent to school in this build- 
ing, practically nothing is known of his sojourn in 
Twyford village. Although the house has been 
transformed into labourers' cottages, the large 
central doorway is still unaltered, and it is not 
difficult to imagine the appearance of the build- 
ing as it was in the poet's boyhood. Probably 
the fact that he was a weakly child accounts for 
his having been sent so far into the country away 
from his London home, and it is not idle to sup- 
pose that his acquaintance with rural life at such 
an impressionable age contributed not a little to 
the early ripening of the pastoral side of his 
muse. Unconsciously, perhaps, yet none the 
less effectively, his sojourn in this lovely village 
stored his mind with the simple yet attractive 
images which go to make up his picture of " The 
Quiet Life," a masterly poem to be placed to the 
credit of a boy of twelve, and thus written four 
years after his Twyford days. Here, if anywhere 
in the whole of England, might it be truly said, 

" Happy the man, whose wish and care 
A few paternal acres bound, 
Content to breathe his native air 
In his own ground." 
396 



IN OLD ENGLAND 

On the way back to Winchester, on the left- 
hand side of the road, and hidden by a high, 
ivy-clad wall, stands Twyford House, immerao- 
rially associated with the inception and first chap- 
ters of the famous " Autobiography of Benjamin 
Franklin." " Expecting," he wrote in the open- 
ing paragraph of that book, " the enjoyment of a 
few weeks' uninterrupted leisure," he bethought 
him to employ the time usefully by tracing the 
steps by which he had raised himself to " a state 
of affluence and some degree of celebrity in the 
world." In that year, 1771, Twyford House was 
the home of Dr. Shipley, the Bishop of St. Asaph, 
and here the illustrious " self-taught American " 
spent several pleasant and well-earned vacations. 
Opposite the house stands a row of trees known 
as " Franklin's Grove," because there the philoso- 
pher was wont to pace to and fro for hours at a 
stretch, meditating, no doubt, upon the tangled 
condition of New England affairs, or perhaps 
conning over again those forthright episodes of 
his life which lend such an unfailing charm to his 
famous book. 

Twyford House forms a not unfitting climax 

to a visit to Royal Winchester. Yonder lies the 

ancient city, its grey stones speaking in mute 

eloquence of the early origins of England, and 

399 



LITERARY BY-PATHS 

leading the mind back to those far-off days when 
her foundations were laid by the Great Alfred in 
love of liberty and truth ; here are the walls 
which once sheltered the man who, perhaps more 
than any other, was typical of the new English 
race in the New World, who counted no labour 
irksome in the cause of liberty and peace. 



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